Herald of Steel

Chapter 681 Public School (Part-1)

While it was true that Alexander did not take many major policies regarding the development of Zanzan, it was not as if he did not take any.

Because to be specific he did take one, mainly making use of the few hundred learned people that Pasha Farzah had sent.

Theocles was put in charge of overseeing their day to day activity, where he would arrange for them to be taught the beliefs of Gaia, most of which he had made up with the help of Ophenia, with some sprinkling of inspiration from Alexander.

Twice a week, these priests would learn these theological texts, as well as earn experience in how to run a temple- such as giving sermons, tending to the devotees, collecting donations, looking after some of the poor, providing some rudimentary healing advice and all sorts of other odd jobs.

But all these could have been said to be their secondary task.

Because their main task, something they did four days a week seemed to have been teaching.

Alexander had already informed Pasha Farzah of his intention to use the men as such and even promised them a large wage of three hundred (300) ropals a month.

When the aged Pasha first learned of Alexander’s intention, he was a bit confused.

He initially thought Alexander wanted to teach himself and his fellow mercenary leader and their children about the cultures of this new country.

Similar to how nobles taught their progenies.

But when Alexander clarified that he wanted these people to teach the general populace, and give them a real proper education, not that wishy- washy being able to only write their name and read some numbers, at first the ruler of Matrak was shocked and then taking a moment to fully comprehending what Alexander was wishing to do, simply burst out laughing.

“Haha, you brat, you sure do all sorts of weird things,” He had cried.

And he used that particular word- weird.

Because from the traditional perspective, it was indeed weird for any lord to teach the general populace en mass.

A major reason was that the ruling class saw it as a way of maintaining their grip on power, with education being strictly restricted to the nobles and the priests.

After all, it was much easier to hoodwink stupid people than clever ones.

And even the few generous lords who would sometimes take in orphans and take care of their education did it ultimately for their own gain.

The numbers they took would be very small, and usually only took the brightest and cleverest of the bunch, where they would be groomed to become useful members of the household, like bookkeepers, small-scale administrators looking after the land on behalf of their lord, stewards, accountants, and other professionals which required some formal education.

But those types of small-scale charities could never equal Alexander’s grand ambition in size or scale, whose numbers were in the thousands, not in the tens.

Besides the ruling class’s obvious dislike for the general populace becoming smarter, there were also other more practical difficulties.

The biggest one was simply that most people did not need a formal education, and was able to go by fine all their life without ever needing to be able to read or write.

And this applied to almost all professions except the nobility and priests, be they farmers, artisans, or even traders.

Yes, even for traders, it was not an absolute necessity to know how to read or write.

It certainly helped, but he could do without it and be even very successful at his trade.

This type of example existed in Alexander’s past life as well, with perhaps the most famous trader there being Muhammad, who by most authentic records was illiterate.

So in most people’s eyes, education was seen as something redundant, something only for the rich fancy folk to pursue who had more time and money in their hands than they knew what to do with.

‘For us poor, ordinary folks, we do not need to worry about that hard, complicated stuff,’ They generally thought.

This type of mindset regarding education might seem weird to some in the modern era, but a somewhat similar comparison of the modern day would be how many people view billionaires using private jets for work.

Most who see those do not dream of one day buying a jet of their own but feel that kind of luxury is reserved for the uber rich.

‘For us normal folks, much more reasonable alternatives of cars, trains, and buses exist,’ They think.

And similar to how expensive it is own own and operate a jet,? mass education also faced that same obstacle as its second practical problem.

The amount of spending needed to be done to make public education free would be bloody expensive for anyone.

Books and teaching materials, the land and building itself, the furniture inside such as tables, chairs, and benches, stationery such as chalk, blackboards, and dusters, and the salaries of teachers, the cost of everything quickly added up when done in those large scales.

Most nobles would never be able to institute these on a mass scale even if they had the best wishes at heart.

After all, there was no noble like Alexander who earned in a year what even most Pasha’s got in a decade, as evidenced by how he was able to transform a comatose city like Zanzan into a rich vibrant center in just three years, by simply throwing massive piles of money at it, starting from setting such huge industries, to all those infrastructure projects, to even giving out those generous bereavement payments, the likes of which were almost unheard of.

But other nobles were not so lucky, so they would not have been able to provide those services for free even if they wanted to.

And mass education had to be free if it was to be effective.

Nobles could not charge them anything.

Because as stated earlier most of the population did not see any need to be educated and would see no reason to spend that money on something so redundant.

They would rather spend that on something useful, like helping their sons get an apprenticeship at their local artisan’s shop, or putting them in a temple to become priests and work in service of the gods.

And all this was assuming they had the money to spend in the first place.

Because remember, most people lived very poor lives, barely getting by.

So if Alexander wanted to educate the poor peasants, he would have to do it out of his own pocket.

In fact, it would not be enough just to pay their tuition, he figured he also would need to pay the parents to send their kids to school.

Yes!

As absurd as it sounded, Alexander reasoned that to get the kids to study, not only the parents would not need to spend a dime, they would even be getting a few dimes in return, just for sending their kids to school.

Ah! If only modern education was so profitable!

But the obvious question then rose here was why?

Why did Alexander think it was reasonable to assume so? .𝒄𝒐𝒎

And the answer lay in the structure of the society of this time.

It had to be remembered that the society Alexander currently lived in an agrarian society, not an urban society like modern times.

And one of the major differences between the two societies was how children were viewed in both of them.

For a city-dwelling, urban society, children were seen as an economic burden, who were unable to contribute to the family in any way, which was why typically parents tended to limit themselves to two to three children.

Any more and it tended to get too expensive.

While for an agrarian society, where children lived in farms, they were not seen as only another mouth to feed, but also as an extra pair of hands.

And there were always work to be done on a farm, even for relatively young children.

Planting seeds with their father, picking weeds, scaring away birds, taking care of the animals, looking after them, cleaning their droppings, and even doing something as mundane as separating the stones from the harvested grains.

All these were tasks that someone needed to do and even small children could contribute.

Whereas for children in cities, all the work available to them would require too much skill for them to even attempt it.

Good luck having your child file your tax returns.

But though children in an agrarian society could contribute to their family and earn their keep so to speak from an early age, making it sound very good, but for Alexander this presented a dilemma.

And that was that given these children were economically important to their families, the parents would be much less inclined to send them away for hours on end to something that produced nothing of immediate economic value.

In fact many viewed it as something that would never produce anything of value.

So to get them to send their kids to school, Alexander knew he would need to tempt them with monetary compensation, which they then could use to hire other helpers to take their children’s place.

And when all these reasons were presented before one, Pasha Farzah breaking into his outburst of incredulous laughter really started to make sense.

The old man was not stupid.

In fact he was extremely smart.

This was why he thought Alexander must have more money than sense to do something so stupid.