Education

[ProphetDragon]

Does anybody know where the children in Skyrim get to study? There are no schools but still all can read. There must be some institute.

And why are there so less children in Skyrim?

[Dark Spark]

...And why are there so less children in Skyrim?

As opposed to Cyrodiil, where the only traces of children lie in crypts and coffins?

I can see the task of education as something the elves would want to carry out the most. The typical elven life is a long time to wallow in ignorance, so schooling would be an elven institution that the human societies happen to join in on.

If you want to reconcile what we find in the game of Skyrim, the temples would be where the cities' children learn to read.

[legoless]

Very few toilets in Tamriel as well. These sorts of mundane things just aren't all that relevant to the setting.

Personally I doubt most people can read. Your average Nord or Dunmer off the street is pig ingorant. Learning seems to be the realm of mages and scholars.

[Vilhelm Valhalla]

[Deleted]

[ProphetDragon]

Shoddycast made a video about this. Austin was telling several things:

The People of Bethesda know that toilets exist. There are plenty of toilets in Fallout 3 and 4. Go and watch this video 'where do they poop in skyrim?'

My guess would be that the parents teach the kids and they don't go to any schools. In the letter to Aventus Aretino, if was written by the Jarl's Steward that he is uncertain of the education facilities in the orphanage.

Whatever happens, we know that the people of Skyrim are highly educated because they all write books and at least fill in their quest logs (as you can play with hundreds of characters at once and they all know to read and write). There is not a single grammatical mistake.

[Dark Spark]

The player character's journal is an Elder Scroll in the process of being written. The player character, therefore, is not the one writing it. You are.

No, that's not Shoddycast. That's me.

[Unionhack]

The biggest thing here is a suspension of disbelief. If cities were as big as they were in the game, Skyrim's population would only number in the low thousands.

Thus we can assume that schoolhouses and toilets exist and just don't need to be shown in the games over adventurer-important things like taverns and shops.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

Most people in Skyrim are literate. Many of them keep personal journals. The business owners have ledgers. Most people have at least one book in their homes or businesses. It can be inferred that literacy rates are high. It's not stated if education is a family thing or funded by taxes in the Holds like a public school system of our own world. This information wasn't included in the game's design, but it can be inferred that people are learning to read and write somewhere.

[legoless]

The People of Bethesda know that toilets exist. There are plenty of toilets in Fallout 3 and 4. Go and watch this video 'where do they poop in skyrim?'

Don't need to watch a video, there's at least one toilet in Skyrim.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

Also, to the person who has a love affair with Shoddycast, be aware that about the only authority they have is their production values. They are not a source of lore, and should not be used in debates. They are fans, like us.

[ProphetDragon]

The Shoddycast are like us, just that they have researched about various games for about ten years.

[Starfang]

They really should included schoolhouses like in the Fable games. It seems really unrealistic to think that all of these kids are growing up in Skyrim without an education, especially with a heavy Imperial presence still lingering in the country.

[Dark Spark]

Unless temple priests spend the majority of their days waving hands over statuary, they must have some other job to do.

[BetaB17]

^Exactly. Many of the local temples may be responsible for educating the populace, if not in the basics or literature. I suspect other skills or knowledge are either passed down from family or via an apprenticeship.

Still, in basic education I wouldnt doubt it if certain priest/religious orders had members that travelled to villages to pass on knowledge or books.. much like how in Fallout NV the Followers of the Apocalypse. As for the need for a higher learning I wouldnt be surprised if scholars were hired as tutors or if larger cities had a simple academy, likely by use of the upper caste

[MetaCthulhu]

There's no doubt that the people of Skyrim teach their children their trade, so I really don't think it's a stretch to assume that they also teach them how to read and write. What would be the point of sending them off to academy when they could be taught at home while they learn the trade?

[BetaB17]

The problem there is academics are harder to pass down generation by generation without, well, a more dependable source. Trade and farming is often simplistic, sometimes based off of life lessons, and while limiting in experience it can be, the family tradecan still thrive <_< if you fail, then your livelyhood fails.

However on the other spectrum.. mistakes can be made.. each generation can be more ignorant than the last till eventually they regress. You can only know as much as the generation prior, and what happens when all that knowledge isnt fully passed down. What if an individual farmer deems his children dont need to know how to read, it does nothing for their crops? Also take in note to speech and grammar <_< things you inherent from family or neighboors, and yet can make you so fastly different than the common population.

Maybe alot of this wouldnt be trouble in busy cities, but plenty of villages survive in isolated patches of land. Alot of folk would be little more than farmers, ignorant in many things that they deal not with and even at times superstitious to all else <_< People may very well be rather ignorant or in some cases uneducated by all extent, but the vast majority seem to know but the basics of readying or even their own history for some reason.

I guess on explanation on why everybody isnt as dullas a bandit may have someyhing to do with racial benefits? I mean some system still needs to be in place for the rough basics.. but look how much quicker Imperials learn when its a book in hand, as opposed to an Orc working their forge

[ProphetDragon]

I researched a bit and found out that in older times children were taught in churches and temples. As for the toilets, buckets were kept in mall rooms where they would poop.

This leaves us with our second problem, there are buckets but they are present in public. I don't recall seeing children reciting poems or prayers or study for tests but I have seen bandits write journals.

[Lavellan]

Sometimes in houses, jail cells, etc you find a random bucket, which I always kind of assumed were the toilets in the houses - sometimes in weird locations but hey, you gotta poop were you gotta poop.

I assume literacy rates are relatively high in the Empire; exactly how 'good' the average literacy rate is, however, is different - I assume a lot of people would probably write like Thromgar Iron-Head's essay "Alduin is Real." I assume a lot of priests and priestesses teach, along with other scholars in an area, and that the Court Mage also probably tutors any children of the Jarl (and, should no children exist, children of people within that area that can pay them) as far as Skyrim goes/any other comparable position. For people who are further out and don't necessarily have a local priest, as long as they're educated, they could teach their child the fundamentals on how to read and write. Depending on who they are, and what job they have, their child might not have the best education, but probably enough to get by - they might not be able to understand a complicated book very well, but enough to read/write letters and bounties, etc.

[Tingz0r]

It's just easier to skimp on stuff like this when making a video game. Since there's clearly no primary schools in Tamriel, we're left to believe that kids are taught by their parents or friends, or even that they are born with certain kinds of knowledge because magic.



Heck, even trolls are partially literate: http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:A_Poorly_Scrawled_Note

[The SheoDovah]

Because of dem elves.


Joking aside, fantasy often neglects or choose not to go into education and I would assume that with TES, children are taught by their parents. In Skyrim, the way of the axe,sword and bow would be a major factor in their education due to the nature of nords. As far as they care, as long as it can kill you and isn't magic, it is worth learning. Basic stuff, like the ability to count past 10, it would be low on their list and well, it is just something Bethesda probably doesn't want to focus on in favour of something more important.

[Imbalance]

Homeschooling is not that bad at all. Bishops and monks started to educate pupils in The Middle Ages so you could learn to read in churches. Note that education during that time was very elitist.

Nice try

Is that where you received your spambot training?

[BetaB17]

Apparently yes

[Cursegrind]

The answer to that would be the Temple. The people learn to read primarily for religious reasons. An Education in Skyrim means going to the Temple for a few hours after your chores each day until you can read the menu at the tavern or the instructions on a manual. Another thing to note is that the people of Tamriel have books as entertainment, which was not a thing for real world humans during the Roman-Byzantine period. Many people will learn to read the same way the Harry Potter generation did.