After reading some ideas from Gikgik about education (decay of democracy on the steam workshop), I started thinking about the concept of the education simulation and its implication for modding policies. It is also quit important to have a good understanding of what it means as it is one of the most important data in Democracy 3 (who doesn’t try to maximize it?).
What does the simulation node of Education stands for? Does it represent the amount of skills the citizen have or does it go beyond skills?
If it is about skills, then:
Only policies providing usable knowledge or skills should affect education: sports, langage, school funding.
All other types of policies that takes school time without teaching skills should actually diminish the education value and affect other values. Sex education is socially useful and affects behaviour but doesn’t teach any form of skills. School prayers and singing the national anthem takes time (not much) that could be used for other things. Compulsory sports classes improves health by improving physical fitness but doesn’t improve education in itself.
This could be counterbalanced by an uncancellable policy defining school time. More school time costs more but means teachers have more time to teach.
However, this means that maxing out the education value should only affect technology, productivity and other purely economical datas and policies regarding education should affect other datas.
If education is about more than skills, then it means having a certain idea of what an educated mind should be. Then and only then can we start to design which policies affects positively or negatively education. If we follow certain atheist ideas, all policies allowing religion to get into schools should negatively affect education. If we follow certain post-modern ideas, then all policies introducing national elements should negatively affect education. And the list goes on.
In the spirit of simulation, I don’t think this is the way to go.
Also, the evolution of the quality of education in a larger sense takes time to make society evolve. The rapidity of change in Democracy 3 is therefore problematic.
Things like sex education don’t teach any skills. It seems to cause there to be a change in population and that can affect education indirectly. If there are too few pupils then teachers will start to be unemployed so you can adjust the sex education policy for instance to try to mitigate that kind of bad situation. But there are other, better, polices that you can use to manage population growth and prevent teachers from being unemployed. That being said, I think that the education level just represents how skilled and literate your population is and that can have huge implications not just for controlling poverty, unemployment, and technology but also whether people of different ethnic backgrounds will get along. I see the education value as one of the linchpins of creating a stable society that won’t descend into extreme nationalism provided other policies are used to help get people jobs and keep poverty under control. As far as the quality of education, it’d be hard I guess to see in real life how putting the max possible amount of money into public schools will improve the quality of education quickly but I don’t see why it couldn’t.
You mentioned faith in education too I think. School prayers might not help people learn better but subsidizing faith schools might be of great help to society but it doesn’t come without some initial risks. It’d be highly controversial in the early stages but I see the subsidy of faith schools as only improving the level of education in society, not harming it.
Sex education doesn’t help with any of that and is useful mostly for managing the attitudes of some voter groups toward you and not much else. All in all I don’t know if I’m right at all but that’s what I think.
There are some education policies that are as follows
1 Vision and Planning
1.1 Vision and overall goals
1.2 Linkages between ICT in education policy and other sectoral policies
1.3 Public funding and expenditure for ICT in education
1.4 Institutional arrangements
1.5 Public Private Partnerships (PPP) on ICT in education
2 ICT Infrastructure
2.1 Electricity supply
2.2 ICT equipment & related networking infrastructure
2.3 Technical support & maintenance
2.4 e-Waste
3 Teachers
3.1 Teacher training and professional development (including pre-service and in-service) on ICT –related topics
3.2 ICT-related teacher competency standards
3.3 Teacher networks/ resource centers for teachers
3.4 School leadership training, professional development and competency standards