Education in Urcea

Education in Urcea is provided in public school, private school, and home schools, and is divided into K-12 education and higher education. Urcean public education is operated jointly by provincial and local governments alongside the Church and is regulated by the Collegium Scientificum, which is both a university system and the nation's public education department. Education in Urcea is traditionally based on the principles of classical education and primary and secondary education are primarily focused on teaching the seven traditional liberal arts.

Principles

According to the Collegium Scientificum, the purpose of education in Urcea is "to mold students into more complete people and able citizen-subjects" by "freeing (them) from their basest desires and creating them as individuals capable of self-rule in the most direct sense". Consequently, the Collegium Scientificum argues that the outcome of education is to create a population "free to pursue the intellectual and religious pursuits of their longing in addition to being capable in their duties to state in life" and to create a population 'capable of self-governance by means of self-rule' and 'self-moderation'."

Cultural touchstones

In addition to technical knowledge and concepts in self-governance, the Urcean education system does include components of education referred to as "cultural touchstones", a fact-and-memorization style of education that gives students a basic understanding of world history, comparative religious beliefs, Urcean literary canon, and a more thorough education on Urcean and Levantine history. While touchstone-based education is not included in every curriculum every year, it is variously included or heavily referenced by year. The intention of memorization of these facts is to provide students cultural literacy and context for human behavior that may provide students the opportunity to acquire additional knowledge as adults when presented with unknown information. In this sense, the Urcean educational model views these types of facts to be the basic building block on which students, when adults, can become more well rounded and capable of self-governance.

Detractors have derided cultural touchstones as "dated, rote memorization" which detracts from the teaching of general skills.

Religious education

In Urcean public schools, catechetical classes are included in every grade level. As a vast majority of Urceans are members of the Catholic Church, all students - Catholic or not - are expected to take Catechesis classes, although non-Catholic students are "graded only on their understanding of the underlying philosophical concepts" according to the Collegium Scientificum rather than their acceptance of the ideas as true.

Urcea's religious education is intended to convey two types of information. The first is called "religion in fact"; this is basic information learned by rote memorization relating to the facts and timeline of salvation history, important Saints, information about the Sacraments and Christian life, scripture, and other information taught in a straight forward way and is similar in concept to cultural touchstones. The second is called "religion in truth", which are more fundamental and complex philosophical concepts about God and how they relate to "religion in fact", including ideas such as divine simplicity, the unmoved mover, and aseity. Both "religion in fact" and "religion in truth" as education are not, contrary to popular opinion, intended to necessarily convince students of the truth of the Catholic faith, though it often has that effect. Instead, the two-pronged approach is intended to equip students "to handle, understand, and apply breakthroughs of grace in their lives with the truth of salvation history; to impart on them the tools of understanding grace in their lives once present". In other words, Urcean society relies on what is referred to as the "violence of grace", a sudden and irreversible act of realization and conversion that occurs in one's religious life. The educational component is intended to contextualize the "breakthrough" when it occurs in order to leave the educated Urcean in a position to truly embrace the Catholic faith. This method has been criticized both by secular educators and some Catholic catechetical experts for departing from a traditional teaching method.

K-12 education

In Urcea, K-12 education is divided into two sections, called "sextets" for grade groupings. Structurally, each sextet is responsible for conferring different subjects but also includes catechetical education classes at each grade level.

First Sextet

The "First Sextet", a period of education which can be roughly equated with "primary education" in other countries, is the first six grade levels (and kindergarten), focused primarily on teaching the trivium - grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The First Sextet includes the years K-6.

Second Sextet

The "Second Sextet", a period of education which can be roughly equated with "secondary education" in other countries, is the second six grade levels, focused primarily on teaching the quadrivium - arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The Second Sextet includes the years 7-12.