Damn, this place is so fascistic, I hate it.
Besides what Nya-chan said - strict discipline kind of comes with the territory - this is an early 20th century school. By modern (Western, at least) standards period education systems were categorically hair-raisingly autocratic.
Hell.
This depiction is a lot milder than memoirs of real period civilian boarding schools I've read, such as Orwell's Such, Such Were the Joys...
This school looks more like a "future officers school" than a school for grunts though. It's pretty tame actually. Teaching them maths, literature, history, science, etc... is pretty useless if you only intend to send them on some war front.
Enlisted grunts don't go into fancy academies but boot camps so, yeah. They also start a whole lot older (around 20 was the typical early-1900s age requirement for draft or enlistement) except in dire national emergencies when the older youths are already all in uniform.
Maths and sciences are pretty important for eg. engineers and artillerists though - no coincidence such "technical" branches have long been the "thinking man's services" alongside the Navy. (The cavalry, conversely, was stereotypically the refuge of the... less cerebral... officers, demanding as it did more split-second decision-making and on-the-fly improvisation than diligent planning.) And officers are universally expected to be pretty well-educated; military history in particular has always been something of a focus in search of useful models and experiences to emulate. Incidentally Western and Westernized militaries during the "Long Nineteenth Century" had a raging hard-on for Classical Antiquity and the Napoleonic Wars as models.
last edited at Aug 7, 2018 8:00AM