Howlina - Day 14 - Education

"Decide now what kind of schooling is available in your world. Decide how your characters have been educated, and in what kinds of subjects. And don't focus so much on their specialty that you forget that they're people."

Howlina is a First World country and has similar educational institutions to any other advanced nation. They have modeled their education system after the most successful systems in other nations, especially the best of the English and US systems.

They excel in the Science and Engineering with an emphasis on self sustainability. They pride themselves in being among the top scoring countries in hard sciences. They are far less interested in the Arts and Humanities on a school level.

Although they are pragmatic and objective they are not profit driven like the Americans. They do afford more efforts for pure research.

Also different from the American system is the place of sport. Sport is far more recreational than competitive.

Arts and Humanities are expected to be taught at home, by the families and churches rather than the schools, but there is not the kind of competition between these institutions that there is in the US.

Parents teach manners, interpersonal relationships, music (singing and instruments), cooking, housekeeping, and even sexual practices to their children. The Beeveelo is the universal guide.

I have not decided the political divisions yet, but I do know that the universities are governmentally supported institutions. There are no private schools beyond elementary school. It is universally agreed that one of the primary functions of their government is to provide for education at the higher levels.

I know that the University of Kaurorapolee is a preeminent school, and may be the best school in the country. A serious rival is the University of Cheekagopolee.

Generally in the universities there is a surrogate family of students.  It is something like a cross between the houses in Hogwarts and fraternities / sororities.  The primary loyalty of children is to their parents until they pair bond with a spouse, but these families bridge the gap while the children are separated.  They are called Houses and are generally given names after their mottos.  As such the names sound something like military operations (e. g. Honor-Loyalty House, Enduring Education House etc.). 

These Houses are all local, with no national chapters or affiliations.  They are single gender so they do pair up.  The House pairings are a formal arrangement and there is a long and detailed House Courtship that occurs before two Houses may be bonded.  Because Houses can exist longer than normal human lifetimes, and because members actually come and go, the bonding is reestablished once every 8 years.

There is a similar set of institutions outside of the schools for unmarried graduates.  Communities and even companies may set up Houses for unmarried people to family-ize in.

What about the Transhumans? 

Supers go through the same schooling as normals.  Because they are longer lived they are very comfortable pacing themselves through the normal school timeframe.  They are always the very top of their classes though, with no chance for normals to graduate Valedictorian.

Cybers on the other hand very often get uploads and implants of knowledge.  They are encouraged to attend normal schools for the social development aspects, but they never fail tests because they have perfect digital recall of whatever they've downloaded.  They don't take a normal course load, but more of classes where they learn how to use the data they have.

Radicals are a very different story.  While Cats and Fae could attend school they generally don't attend it with other races, and it would simply be impossible for Mers.  There is some controversy over it, but there have been a few schools funded, developed, built and operated for these races specifically.