Worldbuilding: On Education

Hello, writer’s note. This is a world-building interlude that explains a portion of the education system. It is unnecessary for the main story, but does help if you want to understand the system a bit better. However, it is really short, so might as well.

At Rosewood, you had a curriculum of seven subjects outlined by now-retired Cardinal Alexander Innman’s Contemplations to Achieving a Gentlemanly and Scholarly Status, an encyclical on education where he devised an education plan with which to make ‘gentlemanly, well-taught, educated and morally-upstanding countrymen’. In Alvaria, where the Cardinal is second only to the King, such an opinionated piece nevertheless held great value and two years later, it was - with some specifications modified - published by the Royal Fellowship Society as the preferred modus operandi for schools.

As part of the new curriculum, the subjects at Rosewood include geometry, arithmetics, calligraphy, natural sciences, social sciences, the arcane and physical training. It was built on in a later encyclical named ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’, which condemned the existing education as being overbearing and expanded the amount of physical exercise and free time dedicated to cultural activities not specified by the curriculum alongside a revised curriculum on natural and social sciences.

Geometry itself was the most important of them all, as it encompassed a wide array of subjects known as Harmonic Principles, which include theology, astrology and geometry itself. These were supposedly the rules through which the world was moulded by its creators and governed by their God.

Regardless, that makes geometry the most valuable subject and success at it the most important, even if it’s calculated equally to other subjects. So far, they’re tied - Augustin took the lead in the first one, Nanami in the second. In the meantime, they’re facing off in other subjects.

Oh, and music? For some reason, that belongs under arithmetics, since it was at first studied in proportions, away from actual music. And singing itself falls under physical training.

The system is almost exclusively used only in Alvaria as the two countries closest to it - Targovia across the sea to the south and Epossia to the north - have a fickle relationship with it over the activities of various Alvarian religious orders in those countries. In consideration of that, the Royal Fellowship Society does have different standards for foreigners and foreign students are usually allowed to transfer into whatever class is compatible with their age.