TMA Education — The Schools of Animalia

This article is an entry in the Animalia citizens' encyclopedia, Animalopedia. Dates follow TMA-Timeline. Related: TMA-Religion / TMA-Daily-Life / TMA-Politics

Education in Animalia refers to the multilayered structure comprising the public schooling system overseen by the Education Division of the Oracle Tower Administration, together with private academies, Family-run educational institutions, and unlicensed street schooling. The official enrollment rate is given as 94%, though some estimates put the real figure — counting the unregistered children of the Shadow Layer and Broken Burrow — below eighty percent (Bulletin of the Animalia Folklore Society, AE 118 edition) 〔citation needed〕.

1. Public Education — The Municipal Mixed-School System

1.1 Ideal and Reality

The municipal schools were built to integrate the children of the many species that poured in during the migration waves of the Founding era (AE 3–30), and their official premise is mixed-species education. "That the child of a predator species and the child of a prey species should sit in the same classroom" is the guiding ideal of the system, which was made compulsory at the same time as the establishment of the Ecosystem Council (AE 31).

In practice, the differences in body size, active hours, and diet across species weigh heavily on day-to-day operations, and "Mixed education is the ideal; the timetable is the art of compromise" is a stock phrase among frontline teachers (TMA Times, AE 115, September issue, "The Savanna in the Classroom").

1.2 Classroom Ingenuity — How Predator and Prey Come to Share a Room

1.3 Curriculum

• Core subjects: reading and writing, arithmetic, and city history (taught from the Founding in AE 1; the Age of Roots is treated as "legend," and since the Catacomb Excavation Ban 〔AE 64〕 archaeological material has been struck from the textbooks), plus the AMT economy (→ TMA-Economy-AMT).
• The Physical-Track system (physical education by species trait): physical education alone splits, by species trait, into the five tracks of "run, swim, fly, dig, climb." It doubles as grassroots development for the Interspecies Olympics (→ TMA-Daily-Life).
• The Luna Shift (lunar-phase timetable): because nocturnal-species pupils lose their focus around the full moon, arrival times shift forward or back according to the lunar phase. During full-moon week the night class "Moon Class" opens, to the dismay of diurnal teachers 〔citation needed〕. No examinations are traditionally held on the day of the new moon (→ TMA-Religion, lunar-phase belief).
• School meals: cooking lines are divided among predator, herbivore, and omnivore species (→ TMA-Daily-Life, §the Green Line / Red Line of school meals).

2. Elite Schools and the Ladder of Advancement

The pinnacle of advancement is appointment to the Oracle Tower Administration, and "to enter the Tower" is the citizen's byword for making one's way in the world. The principal elite schools are as follows.

2.1 Oracle Heights Academy

The civil-servant training school at the foot of the Tower. It is said to produce roughly sixty percent of all Administration appointees 〔citation needed〕. Its entrance examination is fully anonymous, with no species recorded, and it enjoys the reputation that "Oracle grades it, so bribery gets you nowhere" — yet statisticians have noted that the species composition of each graduating class is strangely even, year after year (TMA Times, AE 109, March issue, "The Too-Perfect Pass Rate"). The neutrality of this section is disputed.

2.2 The Liberty Commercial Academy

A financial-elite school adjacent to Liberty Tower (completed AE 83). After the Burrow Panic (AE 89), under the banner "Those who can read the ledger keep the city safe," it was expanded on donations from a Goldfist-affiliated foundation. Its graduates are strong in the Burrow Bank, money-changing, and casino accounting, and many go on to the Five Families' "above-board bookkeeping." It is known for a gambler's ethos: "The tuition is steep, but some students win it back before they graduate."

2.3 The Tenryū Academy

The oldest private academy in Chinatown. A traditional school teaching the Four Books, the abacus, and materia medica, historically close to the incense halls of the Hua-Long Hui but legally independent. In recent years it has taken up VR instruction (technology provided by the Bi-Long Cyber-Castle) and calls itself "the oldest and the newest." It does not teach the Dao arts (with the footnote: not in the official curriculum) 〔citation needed〕.

3. Nightfall Academy — The Five Families' Joint "Shadow School"

Nightfall Academy is an unrecognized educational institution founded in AE 58, during the stable years following the Five-Family Accord (AE 51), on joint funding from the Five Families (→ TMA-Timeline). Its location is undisclosed, and there is even a theory that the school building itself moves 〔by whom?〕.

• The founding logic: In reaction to the Decade of Blood, its stated purpose was "not to send the young out as triggermen with no education," and to thin out the "hotheads who don't know the etiquette" who had been the chief cause of Accord violations. In other words, it is a school for keeping the Accord, which is why its joint operation by the Five Families has lasted seventy years. It is run on a five-season rotation — the office of headmaster passes among the Five Families by season, so that no one Family can claim it as its own.
• Admission: a letter of recommendation signed by an officer of one of the Families is the only way in. Those belonging to no Family are admitted only if they come from the Street Strays, through a quota that requires a "guarantor officer" (it is whispered that the officer Gotham often stands as guarantor 〔citation needed〕).
• Subjects: combat (studied across the styles of all Five Families); intelligence (Tundra-style verification methods); basic Dao arts (instructors dispatched from the Hua-Long Hui; students are never allowed to handle the jiangshi); gambling (probability and nerve; Goldfist-style); etiquette (the rites of the sake-cup ceremony and how to deliver the jingi greeting; Ninkyou-style); and Code studies (no one graduates who cannot recite the five articles of the Five-Family Accord from memory).
• Graduation: there is no diploma. To graduate is "to have your face remembered."

4. Educational Inequality — The Other Animalia

• Unregistered children: In Broken Burrow and the Shadow Layer, many children have no birth registration at all and so lack the standing to enter the municipal schools. Since AE 78, when the Shadow Layer's population passed one-tenth of the surface's, this has been debated again and again in the Council as the heart of the "two Animalias" problem — yet because residence registration means registration in Oracle's observation network, many parents refuse to register (→ TMA-Underworld).
• The Street Strays and street schools: Street Strays, the community of unaffiliated strays, runs its own "Street School." Its classrooms are disused railway platforms and the undersides of bridges; its subjects are reading and writing, haggling, and how to tell a dangerous adult from a safe one. Its teachers are older strays who can read, and the pay is food.
• The Oasis Children's Home: a children's welfare institution to which the Goldfist officer Gotham donates heavily out of casino revenue (→ TMA-Lore). Those who come out of the Home have a "remedial admission quota" into the municipal schools — nearly the only legitimate route by which a Broken Burrow child obtains a school record. Gotham himself has never spoken publicly of the donations (TMA Times, AE 113, December issue, "The Elephant Donor Who Wished to Stay Anonymous").
• Literacy volunteers: Zennin-ji opens temple schools (terakoya), and the moon-waiting fellowships run night classes (→ TMA-Religion). That faith organizations fill the holes in the system has been a tradition since the Founding.

5. Scenes from School Life

• The double menu at lunch: the herbivores' "Green Line" and the carnivores' "Red Line." The Red Line is served ten minutes earlier — a bit of wisdom so that Green Line pupils can be seated before the smell of meat drifts through. Dessert alone is common to all species, and on shaved-ice days morale rises school-wide 〔citation needed〕.
• Hibernation leave: pupils of hibernating species take the whole of winter off and receive "wake-up remedial classes" in spring. "Proxy hibernation" — the hibernating cousin of answering roll call for a friend — is a time-honored form of cheating, expressly forbidden by the school rules.
• The commute: during school-run hours the Metro couples on a "small-species priority car." The "wing escort" system, in which senior eagle-owl students see small-species juniors safely home, is told as a heartwarming tale — though some prey-species parents wear a complicated expression at the thought of it.
• The career-aspiration survey: "a Tower post," "the Burrow Bank," and "casino dealer" are the three great favorites on the record. That there is a fourth popular career, one never written on the form, is something every teacher knows.
• School trips: the standbys are Aurora Park and the Polar Ward. Of late no itinerary is set toward the Glitch Zone (first observed AE 108). To a pupil who asks why, a teacher is meant to answer, "because the electronics break."