Selfian Public Education Reform

Selfian Public Education Reform is a state project to make general education broadly available throughout the empire, beginning with Frelia Public Academy. Conceived by Selfia Cordelica and encouraged by Jack Tanjihiro Chae-wong’s wish for Celeste Cordelica to have an ordinary childhood, it treats knowledge as a source of collective strength rather than a privilege reserved for nobles or a function delegated to automated systems. Its decisive political gesture is that Celeste, the queen’s daughter and an heir to the throne, is enrolled alongside the public the reform is meant to serve.

Background and Purpose

The reform emerges from a conversation about Celeste’s future. Jack Tanjihiro Chae-wong wants his daughter to grow up normally because neither he nor Jill had that opportunity. The existing imperial system offers no public schooling comparable to the Corporate Alliance’s model. Children under seven receive basic readiness training, nobles commonly study at home, and many families do not enter general education until age five, if they attend school at all. Access therefore depends heavily on family position and circumstance rather than a common national standard.

Selfia Cordelica’s answer is a proposed system of standardized education: the entire population would be brought to a certain level of general knowledge. The model resembles Corporate Alliance public education, but deliberately rejects an excessive dependence on virtual reality. The reform favors physical classrooms, human teachers, and direct participation in a shared social environment. Jack’s own educational memory sharpens the contrast: although he once attended a school using virtual reality, his earlier schooling had been conducted by a robot, making automation and cost reduction central features of his experience.

Institutional Design

Selfia’s preferred alternative is in-person teaching by actual human beings, without automation. The intended classrooms are socially inclusive, bringing together people from different walks of life in a manner compared to Almus Academy, but with a more inclusive reach. The reform is designed not merely to transmit lessons but to produce academics and effect change from the bottom of society upward. Selfia acknowledges that such a program will not be universally popular; its first implementation is consequently framed as a test case rather than a claim that the old order has already been transformed.

Frelia Public Academy gives the policy an institutional body. At its opening, the faculty includes people with sharply varied backgrounds: Peter, a cyborg who teaches metalworking, Brigid, a former associate of the academy’s technical community, a former police officer, a reformed meth maker, a disowned noblewoman, and teachers from Almus Academy who survived its destruction. This faculty composition makes the academy’s inclusiveness visible. Its teachers do not represent a single respectable class or a narrowly defined professional elite; their differing histories embody the reform’s attempt to gather social experience into a common educational institution.

Public Announcement and Operation

Selfia announces the initiative from a podium at the academy’s grand opening, adopting an authoritative posture and tone unlike her usual slouching informality. She presents the school as the first of many public institutions intended to cover the nation and openly notes that the project has met pushback and doubt. Her argument joins education to national security: understanding the world and the threats surrounding the nation is treated as a form of strength, while the country’s strength is measured by its weakest members.

The announcement converts the reform from a private proposal into a public commitment. Selfia invokes the principle that knowledge is power and then identifies Frelia Public Academy as the first institutional realization of that principle. She reinforces the pledge by announcing that Celeste Cordelica will enroll in the academy in spring. The declaration shocks the crowd, whose questions and exclamations briefly interrupt the speech, while Celeste’s wave draws hundreds of cameras. The royal child is thus made both a participant in the program and its most visible proof that the institution is not intended only for other people.

The academy opens applications through the intranet site, with enrollment available to anyone while places remain. Its advertised range extends from Early Childhood and Kindergarten through Schuleingangsstufe and Weiterführende Schule, and includes vocational training. The breadth of the listed stages presents the reform as a comprehensive educational pathway rather than a single primary-school experiment. Public access, a wide age range, and vocational instruction together define the academy as infrastructure for an entire society.

Power, Visibility, and Political Meaning

The reform is announced within a courtly and security-conscious world in which information is guarded, movement is controlled, and public appearances are carefully scheduled. Jack has spent two weeks confined to a luxurious room after his marriage to Selfia and coronation, effectively a prisoner whose permitted contact is restricted to Kamila, Ada Nguyen, and supervised play with Leona and Celeste. Even official work is mediated through schedules, security arrangements, and controlled appearances. Against that background, a public school promises a different kind of institutional visibility: not confinement by the palace, but common access to knowledge and social participation.

Its public staging also reveals how education becomes a performative act of rule. Selfia does not merely describe a future policy; she names the academy, opens its applications, places the crown’s daughter within it, and asks the public to witness the commitment. The speech therefore seeks consent as well as compliance. The royal family’s image, the cameras, the enrollment announcement, and the displayed application instructions make the policy legible to citizens as a shared national project. At the same time, the need to advertise the academy and defend it against skepticism shows that the reform must contest established assumptions about who deserves education and how education should be delivered.

The contrast with the book’s other systems of control is especially sharp. Paper folders are valued over tablets because digital devices can be hacked and compromised, while armored vehicles, hidden weapons, military training, and bodily scars mark a society organized around threat. Selfian Public Education Reform answers that atmosphere not by denying danger but by relocating national strength in understanding. Its governing ideal is that security should be supported by a population capable of learning, rather than secured solely through surveillance, weapons, or elite expertise.

Development and Significance

The reform begins as a conversation about enrolling one child but expands into an imperial program. Jack’s personal desire to give Celeste a normal opportunity becomes aligned with Selfia’s political interest in standardized education. Their daughter’s enrollment links intimate family repair to public policy: a childhood denied to Jack and Jill is imagined as something that can be institutionally offered to a wider population.

The policy’s immediate consequence is the opening of Frelia Public Academy and the public invitation to apply. Its larger promise is social transformation through human instruction, mixed classrooms, academic production, and vocational access. The evidence does not establish whether the test case succeeds in the long term, but it clearly establishes the reform’s wager: an empire can become stronger by raising the general level of knowledge and by making the royal household visibly subject to the same educational institution it offers to everyone else. In that sense, the academy is both a school and a challenge to inherited hierarchy, automation, and the belief that public power is strongest when ordinary people remain excluded from it.