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Literacy

Literacy and Education

To meet a literate person in the Imperium is incredibly rare, and deliberately so. If a person can read, they can learn new and dangerous ideas. Worse still, if they can write, they can communicate these ideas to others. Although there has never been a galactic census (across a million worlds, that would be impossible), the Administratum’s best estimates, taken from the estimates of a cross-section of worlds, suggests that 4-11% of the Imperial population is educated to a high enough standard to be counted as literate. Very few, a proportion possibly as low as 1-2%, are educated to an academic standard.

Since most Imperial citizens are illiterate, so it is that most PCs and NPCs in Imperium are similarly restricted. Many parties will have at least one member that is capable of reading, but it is quite common for individual PCs to be confronted with a written text – a letter, a book, a note passed to them in the street – and be unable to read it.

There are professional scribes working in most Imperial cities, and occasionally in larger towns, who will read a text, in return for a fee (see the Trading Charts for details). The downside of this method is that the text to be read may be confidential or in some way dangerous. Handing the Liber Daemonicus to a stranger to read is incredibly foolish, particularly since the Adeptus Ministorum trains most scribes, and they will have no hesitation to report suspicious materials.

As is common in societies where literacy is poor, most shops across the Imperium will have pictorial signs. Advertisements and official pronouncement posters may broadcast looped recordings for those unable to read.

Sometimes though, characters will have to try and read something by themselves.

A character without either Literacy – Basic or Literacy – Advanced can attempt to read a simple text (street sign, advertising flyer, non-literary novel etc.), but requires a Sagacity test. If the test is passed, the character is able to understand the text, albeit with a degree of moving lips and running a fingertip along the line. If it is failed, the character cannot comprehend more than a few of the simplest words of the text. If the test is a matched failure, the character believes he or she has understood the text, but has actually got completely the wrong end of the stick, possibly with unwelcome consequences.

When reading something more complicated (literary novel, contractual small print, technical manual, academic thesis etc.), a character without either Literacy abilities may still attempt to read it, but has a –40 Sagacity modifier. A character with Literacy – Basic can also attempt to read a complicated text, but has a –20 Sagacity modifier. Matched failures lead to misunderstandings as usual, although often the consequences are far more serious.

Most education within the Imperium is in the hands of the Adeptus Ministorum, in both its mission schools and the Schola Progenium. The tightly controlled regime ensures that only approved theories and beliefs are propagated to the students, with a strong religious undercurrent.

The Schola Progenium educates the children of Imperial servants, and gives automatic scholarships to those whose parents have died in the Emperor’s service. As such, there are many military families with a long tradition of Schola education, strongly intertwining faith and military power. Whereas devotion to the Emperor is an admirable trait on the battlefield, the potential weighting of the balance of power towards the Church has long been a source of worry to the secular Administratum, particularly since the religion-fuelled civil wars of the Age of Apostasy. As such, all curricula taught at the Schola Progenium must be ratified by the secular authorities before they can be taught.

Although Schola graduates are not compelled to enter Imperial service, the majority of them do so, entering military, religious or administrative careers. A Schola Progenium education is commonly seen as an advantage in most career markets, and so an educated elite exists, loyal to the Imperium and positioned securely above the common masses. However, the vast majority of this elite is by no means intellectual – few among them will ever come to appreciate the arts, technical innovation has ground to a halt and even philosophy is almost dead. Just as much as the illiterate peasant, if not more so, they are mindless cattle under the Imperial yoke.

The Sciences: The Schola ensures that all of its students have a practical (though not theoretical) understanding of the laws of science, as they are understood within the Imperium. Of course, the technological superstition that rules the Imperial mindset is prevalent, and students are taught that complicated machinery is not to be understood by common man, but only by the Adeptus Mechanicus. The impression of the Machine Cult propagated by the Schola varies from place to place, depending on the attitudes of the priests in charge – most will be generally disparaging of the ‘misguided’ tech-magi while accepting them as vital to the Imperium’s existence.

Mathematics is usually only taught with regards to practical applications, extending no further than basic algebra and equations, and is taught in such a way that obedience to a fixed way of carrying out sums can be carried over into daily life as obedience to the Emperor.

The sciences are heavily slanted by the Imperium’s belief in manifest destiny. Biology is taught in such a way that the supremacy of homo sapiens is implicit, and that no extra-terrestrial biological system can be adversely affected by the introduction of terrestrial life forms, and indeed often benefits from it. Physics and chemistry are limited to that which can be applied in everyday life, with no complicated theory that could incite a mind to think. Psychology is generally only taught to those intending to serve the Emperor in a relevant capacity upon graduating – psychologists, psychiatrists, military officers and Inquisitors, for example.

The Humanities: Military history is rarely completely rewritten to enforce the Imperium’s supposed indestructibility, but a spin is thrown on anything that could be perceived negatively. It would not be appropriate for a school that teaches the next generation of generals and admirals that they will always win their battles – instead they are told how to avoid losing in the same way as their predecessors. Occasional mention is made of how generals who fail the Emperor are hidden from the Emperor’s sight in the afterlife (or some other form of divine punishment, depending on the local religious customs), just to reinforce the importance of loyalty and competence in the military.

Geography is one of the few subjects taught without political restriction, although the quality of teaching, except where specialist teachers can be found, tends to be lacking.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Schola Progenium does teach about religions other than the Imperial Cult. Unsurprisingly, all religions bar the Imperial Cult are described in terms of heresy and barbarism. Pupils are taught dogmatically that the Imperial Cult is the only religion that is acceptable, and all others must be stamped out.

The Arts: The arts suffer dreadfully under the Schola Progenium. If the Schola even has a department dedicated to the arts, chances are that it is terribly underfunded.

Literature and the performing arts are discouraged in most Scholas as being decadent and unworthy of a loyal Imperial citizen. That both art forms can also be used to incite dissidence has not gone unnoticed.

Art is taught in a strictly technical manner, with no emphasis whatsoever placed on imaginative thought or innovation. This stems more from the Ministorum’s tradition of producing exact copies of manuscripts by hand than it does from the desire to suppress radical art (although this suppression is a consequence of the Schola Progenium’s teaching style).

In addition to the Schola Progenium, many Ministorum dioceses run schools for those not applicable to enter the Schola system. These are generally funded from charitable donations, and the standard of the education available there is limited, often taking a pupil no further than being able to write a shopping list and add up the cost of the daily groceries. The teacher is generally the local preacher, or occasionally a visiting missionary, so lessons are interspersed with prayers, commentary on the lives of the saints, and dogma.

Despite the Administratum’s lack of interest in educating the masses, most planetary governments run secular school systems, at least for a portion of society. Some planets make education available to all, while in others education is the preserve of the wealthy or noble elite. Occasionally, education is restricted along gender or other partitions. For example, most worlds deny education to mutants, and some extend this restriction to certain abhuman species as well.

Depending on the technological level and attitude of the culture that spawned it, the curricula of secular educational systems varies. Some are barely distinguishable from the Schola Progenium, but many others are more open-minded, teaching subjects in an open and honest manner. Provided there is no security risk, and no heresies are propagated, the Administratum is happy to allow this to continue – the best academics, doctors, philosophers and theologians generally come from secular backgrounds, and in many ways they aid the Imperium just as surely as their Schola Progenium counterparts. Other organisations, chiefly the Ministorum, but occasionally the Inquisition and some Imperial intelligence services, distrust secular education on the principle that it is often poorly regulated. As a result, most university campuses are bristling with spies planted their to keep an eye on what goes on.

These spies sometimes serve a dual purpose. Some of the most successful Imperial agents have been recruited from a secular educational background, and many attribute their success to their open mind as much as to their devotion to the Emperor.

Because of the sheer variety of secular education systems within the Imperium, no concrete details can be given here. However, most run along similar lines to 21^st century education systems. The main difference is that, traditionally, Imperial education is split into two levels, primary and advanced. Although age ranges vary, depending on cultural attitudes, primary pupils tend to be aged between 4-14 standard years, while advanced pupils are normally between the ages of 12-25. (It is into this latter category that characters with Academic – Student will normally fall.)

No one within the Imperium has as wide-ranging (if superstitious) understanding of technology as the Adeptus Mechanicus, and so it is the best source of education regarding its development, manufacture and theory.

All sentient members of the Machine Cult (i.e. everyone except servitors) are guaranteed a minimum of ten years of education, funded by the Adeptus Mechanicus, and those who actually enter the ranks of the tech-priests are guaranteed free education for life. Since the highest-ranking tech-priests may be many centuries old, and are constantly researching and rediscovering ancient technologies and theories, this is no mean promise.

The Sciences: As would be expected, this is where the Adeptus Mechanicus Academies excel. They teach the full range of science (to the extent that it is comprehended by the Imperium), both in a theoretical and practical context. In line with the Machine God’s decrees regarding the hunt for lost knowledge, very few restrictions are placed on learning and research. Occasionally, students who pursue a theologically questionable line of work (truly cognitive machines, for example) will be dissuaded, at first gently, but failing that, through increasingly harsh disciplinary procedures.

The Humanities: History and geography are taught from a particularly dispassionate perspective. The human element is either completely removed or reduced to the role of automaton: wars that claimed billions of lives become a collection of statistics, flowcharts, maps and detailings of the technologies available to each side; vast migrations are little more than graphs showing the shifting consumption of planetary resources and population change; plagues are seen by the rates of infection, and the minute details of the research to find the cure.

It is suggested that this system is why most machine cultists appear to have a mechanical worldview that is divorced from the reality of flesh and blood.

The Arts: Put simply, there is no art within the Machine Cult, only technology. Technical drawings and blueprints are the Adeptus Mechanicus equivalents of portraits, and a super-efficient servomotor is more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing than the most imaginative sculpture.