The Ordostok Grand Collegium (OGC) was closely affiliated with the Aldiran Academy of Sciences and functioned as its primary educational extension. The university enjoyed a degree of international prestige and was regarded as one of the intellectual centers of its era, contributing to a persistent brain drain from other nations, including the “advanced” ones. This immense institution, capable of accommodating up to ten thousand people, accepted several hundred foreign students. Most were individuals who felt intellectually or emotionally alienated from the regimes and societies of their homelands. Some were fugitives who had severed all familial ties, though not all runaways were admitted, as many were deemed unstable or unsuitable. Admission was granted only through a rigorous intellectual evaluation. To be accepted as a foreign student in Aldira was considered a rare distinction, reserved for those judged to belong to an intellectual aristocracy.
Aldira’s education system treated students less as recipients of instruction than as raw material awaiting refinement. Schools did not primarily impart knowledge; instead, they demanded that students seek, construct, and internalize it themselves, guided by their own intellectual hunger. However, in order to prevent the youth from becoming aimless, the most important principle taught to them was loyalty to the Order. As long as they felt loyalty, they were free to do many things on their own; but if they did not, they were deemed inadequate and were excluded. In other words, there was not education but only indoctrination, and this indoctrination itself ensured that it was perceived as education.
Education did not end once students left school, because in Aldira there was no division of life into separate stages of the kind that proves decisive in other societies. While the youth of other countries attended classes during the day and, once they left school, forgot about it and went off to amuse themselves, Aldira’s youth never truly left school at all. School was everywhere, for there was no meaningful separation between education, society, and identity.
Teachers lectured sparingly and instead focused on teaching students how to direct their own inquiry. Independent study during school hours was common and actively encouraged. As a result, children not yet ten years old might already be familiar with the novels of major writers or theories of outcast geniuses, though often without full comprehension. Such early exposure was not rewarded in the conventional sense. Systems based on pleasure or incentive were condemned as “mechanistic conditioning of the mind.” Perseverance without reward was instead held sacred, instilling ascetic discipline from an early age.
Even from childhood, the pressure was intense, though it was philosophical and ideological rather than vocational. Spontaneity and levity were often suppressed, yet this conditioning produced a high degree of psychological endurance and ideological commitment. Individual depression and anxiety—widespread in many “freer” societies—were unknown among the Aldiran youth.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
The principal purpose of schooling was not preparation for higher education but preparation for membership in the Aldiran Order. Traditional examinations based on standardized or multiple-choice testing did not exist. Instead, assessments focused on depth of perception. Knowledge and understanding were treated as distinct qualities: one could be knowledgeable and yet merely well-informed, whereas being considered “mentally elite” required originality, coherence, and creative synthesis, even in the absence of extensive factual mastery. Accordingly, examinations were almost entirely open-ended, with students required to write extended essays. These writings, which expressed personal interpretations rather than rehearsed answers, were evaluated according to their internal coherence, a measure that determined one’s rank.
Because there was no national ministry of education, individual institutions enjoyed considerable methodological autonomy, though their curricula remained bound to a higher doctrinal authority. One school might conduct instruction within a botanical garden, while another operated entirely within austere concrete structures. Some teachers relied primarily on oral exposition; others emphasized writing, observation, or tactile engagement. This diversity of form gave each school a distinct character, yet all remained unified by a single foundational text: the Holy Black Book.
Classes typically consisted of ten to twenty students, and lessons were rarely held in the same location for long periods. Some sessions took place in small interior rooms; others were conducted outdoors. Extended excursions—to forests, industrial sites, museums, or galleries—could last days or even weeks, leaving classrooms empty and rendering the notion of a “fixed learning space” largely obsolete.
Breaks between lessons were mostly spent in silence rather than conversation. Even during instruction, students spoke only when necessary. Thus, a typical Aldiran educational institution resembled a vast library more than a loud school.
The Order administered monthly examinations known as Purity Tests. Though resembling academic evaluations, these functioned primarily as instruments of societal calibration. Participants received extensive sets of questions spanning literature, geography, psychology, sociology, and related disciplines, all regarded as facets of a single intellectual continuum. Candidates were required to compose lengthy essays articulating their interpretations. Those who failed were formally warned and instructed to improve through intensified self-directed study. Since autodidacticism was already normative, these expectations reinforced rather than disrupted existing practice.
Individuals who remained persistently “inadequate” in the tests faced two sanctioned outcomes, as no one was released into society without “correction.” They could be reassigned to intensive labor in the northern regions, described officially as “ambitious mining service,” or confined to an “Enlightenment Chamber” until intellectual compliance was achieved. In the latter case, individuals were placed in solitary cells resembling isolation facilities used for convicts elsewhere, furnished only with ideologically approved encyclopedias and texts. Deprived of alternative stimuli, they read continuously until the material became internalized. Upon reevaluation, those who met the required standard were released and reintegrated.
This method of reeducation, though severe, proved effective in eliminating ignorance, bigotry, and ideological dissent while ensuring that even the most gifted minds aligned themselves with the Order’s unorthodox philosophy. It was, in essence, a system of “enforced enlightenment.”
