Herald of Steel

Chapter 684 Public School (Part-3)

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It took Alexander almost three years, with one year of that being when Alexander really paid his attention to solving all those teething problems, that the printing press could finally come to life this summer.

  Alexander was at last able to manufacture the machine and hire enough people to make the whole thing finally operational, thus finally being able to print books.

Alexander at the moment ran ten such presses, with plans to make it into twenty in the future.

Most of the workers there were involved in manufacturing the template for each of the book pages, meaning they spent most of the day looking at a book page, and meticulously copying it onto the special metal bed using the metal molds.

Once one page was made, they would run a test run to check for any spelling mistakes and then adjust according.

And once they finished the template of that page, they would either start printing it immediately or properly label it using the book's name and page number before storing it in the archives for printing in the future.

Now, Alexander was not limited to printing only letters.

He could even print pictures, though it was more expensive as a custom made wooden, or metal mold of the picture had to be first made.

All this work was as one could guess needed learned men, and since Alexander needed only 30 teachers, the rest of the few hundred men Pasha Farzah sent were made to work in the printing press, four days a week for 250 ropals a month each.

And with their help, if all ten of the printing presses was running at full capacity, Alexander would be able to churn out 30,000 to 35,000 pages every single day!

Something that might have needed ten thousand scribes to accomplish by hand.

And it was such immense increases in productivity that allowed Alexander to decrease the price of books by hundreds of times for the school children.

And since the human brain cannot easily visualize such huge differences, well it was the equivalent of something like a house costing as much as a few hundred bucks.

Though the fact that even with such huge price reductions Alexander still needed to spend so much on education went on to show the inherent costly nature of the endeavor.

However, it should also be noted that Alexander expected these expenses to drop drastically once the fruits of education became apparent to the public.

He expected that once the rumor about the free food went out, many people would come flocking, possibly allowing Alexander to no longer pay the 8 ropals a week to parents, and perhaps, even start charging some money.

Though he doubted it would ever be enough to fully pay for itself.

But still, Alexander looked forward to the change in mindset, though for now, Alexander knew he had to keep dumping money.

And after spending so much, what did Alexander wish the students to be able to do after finishing their graduation?

Well, for the first year, regarding the subject of maths, it was basically primary level stuff.

They were just starting out after all.

So for the first six months, the book given to them would teach basic number recognition, enable them to write them in words, understand the concept of even and odd numbers, arrange numbers in ascending and descending order, and other easy stuff. 

While for the next half of the year, the focus would be on learning about addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

Alexander did not add division to the course plan because he thought that might be too advanced for the first year.

After all, remembering how to do long division was hard for even adults.

Hence Alexander opted to leave that one out till the second year, when the students would become a bit more mature.

As it could be gathered from the context Alexander had personally written the math course textbook as he could not find any suitable ones among the ones Pasha Farzah and Lady Inayah had sent over, and even doubted such suitable ones for kids even existed.

So he made his own one, one which did not have only lifeless numbers filling them but also had numerous practice exercises to test their knowledge on, such as writing numbers from words and vice versa, figuring the number out from its description, like finding the largest 4 digits even number, circling the odd one out, and various other problems.

While learning about the three operations involved practicing many, many example problems about them, all of which Alexander had handmade.

The math textbook that Alexander had written was 50 pages long, and currently with 1,000 copies in circulation, it was the second most popular book in Adhania, right after the Holy Scripture of Ramuh- Taqua..

Now teaching all these to kids who were just learning the numbers for the first time might seem a bit daunting.

But it had to be remembered that they were around ten years old, so were the equivalent of fourth or fifth graders, which was plenty mature.

In fact, they were even more so when the context of the time was taken into account where people tended to mature much more quickly.

There were kids just a few years older who started families! 

So Alexander figured he could teach all of this in the first year.

As ofr the second year, he wanted to complete mastery of the four basic functions, including things like least common factor (LCF), highest common factor (HCF), and BODMAS (the equivalent of PEMDAS for the US).

Then in the third year, he wanted to teach geometry of various shapes, such as their angles, area, and volumes, as well as some basic trigonometry, which would be useful for things like construction.

And lastly,, in their last year, Alexander wanted to introduce algebra, which was a branch yet to be invented.

As to whether he would have a fifth year to teach another brand new topic- calculus, well Alexander had not decided yet.

This was because Alexander was not even sure if he could cover all this in four years, so decided to wait to determine whether to extend the curriculum by a year after looking at future results.

Now, if it was not obvious enough, Alexander really put his emphasis on maths, leaving the other two subjects mostly to the wayside.

An action that was really self-explanatory.

Alexander wanted inventors, scientists, administrators, and lawyers. 

He did not care much about his students knowing about the language, just as long as they could read and write the words well enough.

He expected some of them to become scientists like Newton or Gallileo, not famous playwrights Homer or Shakespeare.

Because frankly, Alexander had little love for the arts, much preferring the sciences. 

Thus the textbook for the Azhak language to be taught at school, only had the letters and a small collection of everyday used words, along with some popular rhymes, poems, and famous stories that Alexander had haphazardly put together into a weird, incoherent amalgamation, to be taught over two years.

As for the history textbook, well that would be better called a general knowledge book.

Because it did not cover any one topic but a hodgepodge of everything.

For Adhania, it listed the name of its capital, its provinces, some of the specialties of those provinces, famous rivers and mountains of the country, its local flora and fauna, and many other tidbits.

Then there was a brief history of how the current Adhania came to be, from its very inception to its current state.

It described the rise and fall of various dynasties, about how the current royal family came to be, and why there was currently a civil war.

And of course, it painted Amenheraft in a very unflattering light while painting Ptolomy as a righteous ruler and Alexander his greatest sword and friend. 

Alexander was pretty proud of his propaganda piece if he said so himself,

The book also clearly showed the social structure of the nobles.

This was because though it might seem like common knowledge, to most peasants, they only knew that their local lord was their master and the king was bigger than him.

That's it.

After all, whether to a shordar or a king, a peasant was the same, a bug.

Thus most had no idea what the peerage of their lord meant, or that their 'boss' might actually have many other bosses.

So the book very briefly made them aware of the significance of the words shordar (baron), talukder (viscount), etc. and how the country's political system worked.

And in a way, Alexander also did this to show his status, as the people up until now really did not understand what being a Pasha actually meant.

He also listed the names of the large noble houses, particularly the Matbars (Marquiss) and Pashas, as well as their coat of arms, and a brief summary of their past.

In here too, Alexander embellished the achievements of his allies, while vilifying Amenheraft's staunchest allies like Pahsa Vivizan and Djose.

This was everything to be taught regarding Adhania.

But the history book did not just stop there.

Because Alexander also made sure to include a bit of history about Adhania's neighbors, painting all of them in various colors as it suited him, with the intention of burying a seed of revenge or lust for conquest against some of the foreign lands he wanted to have.

It was not any grand ambition, but Alexander thought, 'Hey, it can't hurt to try right?'