The great sage Astinus wrote in his Commentaries on the History of the Elves, II, 16: "The one sure shield against darkness is light."

The wise chronicler meant this in more than one sense, of course, but nowhere is the sentiment stronger than in his esteem for learning, which was the cornerstone of his life. Whether combating chaos, dragons, or the ignorance of mortal men, knowledge is the first, best defense against the forces of darkness. Evil thrives where knowledge and thought are extinguished, so the preservation of learning is best accomplished by spreading it to as many living, breathing folk as possible. Books burn, scrolls decay, but life tenaciously goes on even in the most barbarous circumstances.

Education is not all about struggle, however. While the knowledge of making good steel and building stout walls can make a country strong, it is arts and letters that make a nation great. Battle would be a bloody, repugnant business without poets to sing about honor and courage. The air would be dull and lifeless as a desert without sweet music to lighten it. Houses would all look the same, palaces would resemble prisons, and temples would be unknown without the skills of architects, artists, and builders.

Yet our age is not kind to learning. Wars and lesser struggles for power have left the land bereft of many good things, scholarship being one of them. How then does learning continue in the lands of Ansalon?

As befits their ancient culture, learning is greatly valued among the Silvanesti and Qualinesti elves. Elves have the oldest known written language, and their scribal class has always enjoyed prosperity and privilege. The state could not run without them.

Today, as in the past, scribes choose their apprentices from the ranks of elf boys, for only males are allowed to become scribes. The young sons of commoners are preferred, as they have the ambition needed to insure accurate work. Thrice yearly the guild of scribes hold a fair in Silvanost, and families come from throughout the realm to test their sons for this lucrative career. Only one boy in ten hundred attains the highest level of proficiency in the guild, but many less-qualified youths serve in the halls of trade and power, doing great service to the elven nation.

An apprentice scribe usually begins his training at age eight. He is expected to master the complex elven script by age ten, and then for twenty years to serve his master as copyist, ink mixer, and quill shaver. At age thirty, the apprentice scribe takes examinations for master status (there being no journeyman grade). If he passes, the scribe can expect lifelong employment anywhere in the speaker's kingdom at a good salary. He can also finally marry—apprentices are not allowed wives. The elf playwright Sanakendes wrote a famous comedy, Apprentice Nath, about an elf lad's struggle to keep both his bride and his scribal career. Nath manages to hide his wife and four children from his masters for most of the play, and in the final scene, as a rival is about to expose him, the stars rise to mark the end of Nath's ten-year apprenticeship.

Elf boys not inclined toward a scribal life receive more general education from members of House Bardic, the clan of poets and musicians, and from House Measure, the clan of mathematicians, surveyors, and architects. Elf families tithe in gold, silver, or gems to the houses for their teaching, the exact amount being based on the weight of the child attending. Poorer families, whose children are more likely to be thin, thus pay less than rich families. In rural Silvanesti districts, itinerant scholars of House Bardic and House Measure circulate, often remaining in a village for four or five weeks at a time, receiving little more than room and board for their work. City or country, elven schools are always held outdoors. The elves believe thoughts do not take root in young minds very well unless they arrive in the full light of day.

Despite the prohibitions of the scribal system, girl children are more highly educated in elven countries than in any other. Indeed, while elf boys can end their schooling at age fourteen, elf girls are expected to remain under instruction until they marry. Boys usually go on to a vocation—farming, trades, the army—but girls are expected to learn the arts and sciences. Elf women are the guarantors of culture in Silvanost, and status among them depends as much on their knowledge and taste, and less on vulgar wealth.

This system that I have described persisted unchanged in Silvanesti for millennia. After the Kinslayer War, hatred of foreigners caused the elves to look inward and backward. Their education system became more rigid and antiquarian. According to many Silvanesti, their civilization peaked before the war, and all that has happened since is decadence and corruption. Resisting foreign ideas and influences is now the "duty" of elven scholars. Innovation and experimentation are suspect. This stagnation has served the Silvanesti state ill during the turbulent years of our own time.

The Silvanesti's more cosmopolitan brethren, the Qualinesti, kept most of the old methods of education intact but incorporated new ideas and the latest discoveries. The scribes' guild was opened to females in Qualinost (largely due to the influence of powerful and independent females in the royal house), and there were female warriors, architects, stargazers, and mechanicians, as well.

One product of this equality, a Qualinesti woman named Cylu Simunjuntac, invented the method of block printing. She began as a student of the master calligrapher Anzianash, but had great difficulty making certain decorative uncials.

One day, as Cylu sat in the atrium garden of her home, trying to master the four cursive sibilants, she saw the family cook chase one of her father's hounds out the kitchen door. The dog had trod in some spilt jam, and left purple paw prints on the gray marble stepping-stones in the garden. Cylu realized every paw print was the same, and made the leap of logic that by carving a letter in wood (reversed, of course) and using dry, thick ink, perfect copies of the letter could be made every time. She passed her calligrapher's test using block printed letters, and the method has since spread throughout the world.

Anzianash, when he found out Cylu used blocks to print her letters, revoked her certificate of mastership. She promptly printed a new one, creating the title of "Master of Printing," and bestowing it on herself.

In basic education, the Qualinesti follow their roots, with children taking their lessons under the spreading shade of an oak. Schoolmasters are scholars from the western branches of House Bardic and House Measure, with a few distinctly Qualinesti touches added, such as natural philosophy lessons from members of House Celestial. Qualinesti schools are open to all races, but attendance is not compulsory. Depredations of dragon forces, the Dark Knights, and other disruptions have led to a drastic decline in Qualinesti schools.

Of the other elven races, hard knowledge is spotty. We have a few glimpses of life among the Dargonesti (deep sea elves) taken from the account of Princess Vixa Ambrodel of Qualinost. Her fleeting contact with Dargonesti society revealed a very regimented, militaristic world where slavery was normal and even the most common activities were organized along strict military lines. Sea elf children (chiefly males) were grouped into bands called "regiments," where they lived and worked together until they were old enough to serve in an adult warband. Their instructors are all old warriors, who taught them tactics and spearmanship along with reading, writing, and ciphering.

Female Dargonesti have a pleasanter time. Their chief areas of study were natural history and aquaculture, which is to say, the husbandry of sea animals and plants. The Dargonesti all have an innate ability to communicate with sea life, especially whales and dolphins, and these sea beasts live in harmony with their elven neighbors. Princess Vixa recalled hunts in which dolphins acted as hounds for the Dargonesti, chasing schools of fish into net ambushes. If the dolphins are unhappy with the results of the hunt, they may take all the fish, or else depart and not return until their tempers are soothed. Hunts had to be negotiated by a priestess, usually a mature Dargonesti female. Whales and dolphins prefer to speak to female elves, judging the males to be too harsh and violent. In spite of the strong military emphasis in Dargonesti culture, sea elf women enjoy great prestige and power, thanks to their mastery of sea-life. Girls train in aquaculture until they mate. If they never join with a male, they may remain in a temple all their lives.

Writing presents insoluble problems underwater—no jest intended. Paper and parchment are unknown among the Dargonesti. Their usual method of writing consists of branding syllabic symbols on sheets of eel hide. The forty-nine syllables of the Dargonesti tongue are represented by forty-nine small irons, each kept in a dish of mild acid. A Dargonesti scribe presses the irons to the hide, branding the symbols indelibly. Another writing method observed by Princess Vixa consisted of painting on eel hide with ink made from the beards of rose-colored mussels. This scarlet ink was completely waterproof, but so expensive only the highest officials used it for the most important documents.

The Dimernesti, or shoal elves, live at the crossroads of land and sea, and as a result use many techniques unique to these opposite worlds. They have never forgotten their land-based script, though a Silvanesti scribe would be horrified at the "decadent" form of writing the Dimernesti use. The shoal elves even have their own scribal schools, where talented children are trained not only to write on parchment (salvaged from shipwrecks, mostly) but to carve their letters on driftwood and terra cotta.

Basic education for children of both sexes begins at age five. Classes contain both boys and girls, who receive the same teaching until age fifteen or so. Then the Silvanesti pattern tends to recur, with males going into trades or military service, and females honing their cultural skills. The Dimernesti esteem music and cookery as high arts, and pride themselves on both. Masters of the arts are accorded great respect and influence.

Curiously, the shoal elves have the most free society of any of the elves. Forms of an old monarchy remain, but Dimernesti society is governed by the votes of all resident adults. Unlike some human countries where property or wealth is a qualification to vote, in Dimernesti settlements the sole criterion of franchise is education. If a shoal elf can read the bill of law being voted on, he or she may vote on it. The Qualinesti, who pride themselves on the equality and justice of their history, have never approached the coarse-looking shoal elves in terms of liberty.

Why this strain of aquatic equality? Perhaps the answer lies in the freedom of the shallow, open sea, where any elf who dislikes his neighbor or his town's policy, can simply swim away and found his own settlement. Food and space is so abundant in shoal water (and the dangers of deep water less prevalent), it is hardly worthwhile for the strong to try to dominate the weak. In the absence of a natural aristocracy, the Dimernesti are governed by learning and wisdom alone—a strange but noble custom.

At the very highest levels of scholarship, elves are strangely absent. There is no elven counterpart to the great sage Astinus, for example. Partly this is due to the fierce isolationism of the Silvanesti homeland. It is also true the finest elf minds inevitably turn to politics or the spiritual realm. The achievements of the Silvanesti in the Age of Light are ample evidence of their success in matters of state and magic. No doubt many great treatises on government and thaumaturgy are stored in the ancient halls of Silvanost, but no outsider has ever seen them. Humans crave to share their learning with others, but the elves hide theirs away, considering their highest achievements too sublime for the uninitiated.

Whatever their shortcomings, the elves succeed well in producing a general population that is both literate and appreciative of learning. Having clans of devoted scholars to serve as teachers to the young is perhaps the greatest achievement of the elves in the realm of education. [The researcher says little about elven xenophobia, a prominent and unattractive feature of their educational system. Elf children are, from an early point, taught the inferiority of all races to their own. This accounts, perhaps, for the general sterility of elven literature.]

All know the name of Ergoth and well remember the mighty glory of the empire of that name. The power of Ergoth, both military and trade, rested on the vigor of its people and on a constant striving for progress. When Ergoth became too rich and too corrupt, the empire passed its vigor to others, and so lost its strength. One of their failings was in education, as we shall see.

In the early years, there was no organized education in Ergoth. What teaching existed was the fruit of the apprentice-journeyman-mastership system of trades. Thus a boy seeking entry into the guild of barrel-makers would apprentice to a master barrel maker, and be taught those skills his master deemed necessary. Elementary reading, writing, and ciphering were part of most apprenticeships. Many trades, such as stockman or farmer, required no such skills, and most Ergothians in the countryside remained ignorant of higher learning.

By the reign of Emperor Quivalin II (called "the Learned"), contact with Silvanesti elves in the east showed up the backwardness of Ergoth, so the emperor embarked on a plan to improve the knowledge and welfare of his subjects. A Guild of Sages was created by imperial fiat, and philosophers from every corner of the continent were offered gold to come teach in Ergoth. Many went, including a sizable number of Silvanesti from House Bardic and House Measure. All towns in Ergoth subject to imperial levy were granted a teacher from the Guild of Sages. Schoolhouses of specified size were to be built in every town, and any subjects not gainfully employed were encouraged to attend. Note education was not limited to, or even aimed at children, who nonetheless made up the largest contingent in the new schools.

Though no more than one-third of Quivalin It's schools ever actually opened, their presence had a profound effect on Ergoth. Trade increased, invention flourished, and after many years of stagnation, the population grew as well. People no longer feared what lay over the next hill, once their schoolmasters had taught them about maps and geography. Literacy improved from nearly none to the point that one Ergothian in four could read.

The old, clumsy Ergothian system of record keeping, consisting of notched wooden staves, was abandoned in favor of elven-style writing and numbers. Quivalin II convened a council of sages in the twelfth year of his reign, and a script was created for the Ergothian tongue. Modified down the ages, the Ergothian alphabet is now used throughout Ansalon, save in elven lands.

What one ruler can create, another can demolish. A later emperor, Quivalin III, was a wild, barbarous young man who cared only for conquest. To fund his wars, he cut off the stipend to the Guild of Sages, and many of the foreign-born teachers went home. Enough remained to put the guild on a cash basis, charging its students tuition. Despite the cost, enrollment in levy-town schools increased early in Quivalin Ill's reign. Once the smaller schools began to fold due to lack of patronage, student numbers plummeted. Hungry for more learning, some young people left their home villages and traveled to larger towns, where a wider variety of subjects were still taught. This led to young people remaining in school longer, some as late as their twentieth year.

In 2488 PC an incident occurred that forever tarnished the role of learning in Ergoth. In Daltigoth, a band of older male students were forcibly pressed into service in the emperor's army. Angry at being taken into service against their wills, the thirty-six boys plotted their escape. They wrote a manifesto on their rights as free men, and managed to spread discontent throughout their company. In 2487 PC this inspired the infamous Argon Mutiny, in which four companies of the Imperial Army refused to obey orders. Noble officers were seized, and the imperial standards were thrown on a bonfire.

Quivalin III never liked "scroll learning," and he liked it even less when he heard of the mutiny. He dispatched a warband of cavalry to capture the mutineers, which they did with much unhappy bloodshed. All thirty-six students were beheaded, and Quivalin III had their heads displayed atop the palace wall with scrolls protruding from their mouths.

Harsh edicts followed, banning philosophy and "scroll learning" in Ergoth. Trade skills flourished—metal working, building, pottery—but higher learning all but died. The study of magic was severely curtailed, an economy Quivalin III learned to regret. The emperor was eventually forced to hire wizards from outside his realm, which proved more expensive than retaining native sorcerers.

The lamp of learning flickered in Ergoth but didn't die out. The great age of the wandering scholar began. These men and women traveled throughout the empire, exchanging information with each other and holding public lectures for which small admission fees were collected. Many of these scholars were also wizards and healers. They kept the light of knowledge glowing in Ergoth, but they could not repair the damage done by Quivalin III and the Argon Mutiny.

As Ergothians became richer and more concerned with spending money than making it, the real work of the empire fell more and more to outsiders. Solamnic horsemen became the backbone of the army, and trades fell into the hands of dwarves, elves, and human tribesmen from the great plains. By the time Vinas Solamnus wrung independence from the emperor in 1791 PC, Ergoth was bereft of vitality and ingenuity, in large part due to the enervating lack of general education.

The lesson was not lost on the great Solamnus. Looking back almost 800 years, he took the lesson of Quivalin II to heart and opened free schools in Solamnia. Only children were allowed to attend, and the schools met from dawn to dusk, four days a week—Solamnic children were still expected to do chores at home! [In our own degenerate times, this fine tradition has died out.] Every town and village owing fealty to the Solamnic Knights was required to have a schoolhouse. Scholars wandered the land, teaching here and there, remaining in towns they liked. They were paid mostly in kind, but they enjoyed special status and respect. Many of the traveling schoolmasters were from the old Ergothian Guild of Sages, but a major contingent among Solamnic scholars were retired knights, who lent the strong moral character of the Measure to their country's education.

A typical school day in Solamnia began at 6 a.m. with each child washing (this was a special command of Solamnus, who highly valued cleanliness). There was a light breakfast at 6:30 a.m., and lessons commenced promptly at 7. All students were kept in a single room, and advanced students were expected to help teach younger and more backward ones. The curriculum was simple and never varied: in the morning, letters, writing, and recitation. This last was usually poetry or history extolling martial virtues and knightly honor. After a modest lunch, the afternoon was taken up with ciphering, measuring, and geography. Formal instruction ended an hour before sunset, and the children were then taken outside for physical training. Boys and girls fenced with staves, climbed trees, and rode horses. The three non-school days of the week were devoted to home chores and trade apprenticeship. When boys reached military age—about seventeen years old—they could apply to an academy where the duties of a squire were taught. Knighthood was their ultimate goal. Boy and girls not drawn to a warrior's life could enter trade guilds wherever their aptitudes took them.

This rational system should have been widely imitated, but it never was. Other nations lacked the cohesion of Solamnia and its dedication to higher principles. Some states were too poor or too thinly populated to allow children to spend four days a week in "idleness." They had to work in field and shop to make ends meet.

After the First Cataclysm, the education system of Solamnia revived with no loss of prestige. While the common folk blamed the Knights for the Cataclysm, no one blamed the scholars. All through the Time of Darkness, village schools struggled onward. Student numbers waxed and waned according to the fortunes of the nation. The system really only failed at the onset of the Chaos War.

Today, Solamnic schools are few in number (and largely confined to settlements on Sancrist Isle), but their memory is a model all countries should look to. [Many valuable treatises on Solamnic education were held in the library before the Chaos War, but alas, they vanished with Astinus in the war's wake. Today we are just beginning to reassemble this collection, but the original can never be duplicated.]

The Knights of Takhisis adopted the old Solamnic system wholesale, substituting their own propaganda in place of Solamnus's strictures on hard work, duty, and the Measure. It is evidence of the effectiveness of the Solamnic system that the Dark Knights have managed to hold onto their country, even if it is surrounded by territory ruled by the great dragons and their minions.

Abanasinia, the crossroads between the lands of men, elves, kender, and dwarves, has always been a tolerant place where ideas and knowledge were traded as freely as good ale, fine leather, or tempered steel. Every settlement had its own ways, but in general they followed the Solamnic model of education—a single-room schoolhouse, instruction three or four days a week, taught by itinerant scholars. In Abanasinia, the schoolmaster was as likely to be a Thorbardin dwarf or a half-mad gnome from Sancrist Isle as a human or elf. The children attending were also likely to be from many races. Abanasinia has never produced a famous sage, but many skillful brewers and tanners began their careers there.

Of late the land has been under the occupation of the Dark Knights, who have brought a certain heavy-handed stability to the region. Gnomes and dwarves are not to be found teaching any longer, nor are Qualinesti elves very welcome. The Knights have tried to pry apart the comfortable mixing of races in Abanasinia, in order to divide and rule. Most schoolmasters installed by the Dark Knights are elderly and retired warriors of the order, for whom the schoolhouse is seen as an honorable sinecure. The thrust of education these days centers on obedience and loyalty to the order.

Though descended from common stock, there are not three more dissimilar races than the dwarves, gnomes, and kender. [Dwarves indignantly deny that they share a common ancestry with gnomes and especially with kender.] It is beyond the scope of this treatise to ponder why they are so different, but their temperaments wholly guide their views of learning and how they go about educating their young.

Dwarves are stolid, hard-working, practical folk, seldom disposed to airy philosophy and artistic speculation. A dwarf asks two questions of life: What is this thing I hold in my hand, and how can I use it?

Given the down-to-earth nature of dwarf minds, one might imagine they have no schools at all. This is quite wrong. Save for the gnomes discussed below, dwarves maintain the most structured school system of any race in the world.

At a tender age, a dwarf child is required to go a special room in the caverns, called a "playmine." This is a large chamber filled with tools, blocks of stone, metal implements, and such. The children are left to play as they will, under the watchful eyes of Skillmaster dwarves. Preferences and talents are noted and recorded. If a child shows interest in hammers, he may be guided into a career in stone cutting. Interest in metals may lead to apprenticeship in a smithy, and so on. This system serves the dwarves very well.

Subjects such as writing and ciphering are taught to all dwarf children up to the age of physical maturity. Maturity is measured in a curious, genuinely dwarfish way: When the child feels the time is right, he is led by his elders down a narrow passage cut in the rock. Without warning, stone blocks are lowered, blocking the aspirant's way forward and back. To escape, the child must shift one of the blocks somehow—either by brute strength or by some mechanical stratagem. If he fails or cannot escape for a day and a night, he is released by the adults and goes back to school. If he frees himself, he is deemed an adult and can enlist in the guild of his choice.

Schoolmasters in the dwarven kingdoms are invariably dwarves themselves. Aside from competence in a special skill (like metal working), dwarven teachers are expected to have traveled abroad. Knowledge of the world beyond the mountains is deemed the best qualification of all for a scholar. It is no coincidence that the dwarvish word for "learned" is the same as their word for "well traveled."

Dwarves excel in one skill above all others: the shaping of stone and metal. Techniques for these arts are jealously guarded by the clans that possess them, and are passed down only from one master artisan to the next. Betraying the secrets of a guild means shame and death to the betrayer. No one enters a dwarf guild lightly, nor leaves the august company for any reason short of death. Family and name are as important to dwarves as they are to any proud people, but the guild is even more sacred.

Just as heads of a lodestone oppose each other, so the gnomes are the opposite of their dwarf cousins. "Practical" is a not a word used in gnomish lands. That fact aside, gnomes revere knowledge more than any other race, but only knowledge of the most useless, cumbersome kind. Hero of the Lance Sturm Brightblade once observed, "A man can bridge a stream with log, an axe, and two strong arms. A gnome needs a mountain of tools and more lumber than in a house, and will spend a fortnight drawing plans." [In the end, of course, a gnomish bridge will include a catapult, two ladders, and a device for boiling eggs. One scholar has remarked that the peculiarity of gnomes arises from their tendency to focus on a solution to the immediate problem to hand without seeing any of the implications of that solution. Thus their solutions inevitably extend themselves further and further from the original problem until whatever they are working on bears no resemblance whatever to its original design. Sooner or later, of course, the problem is resolved by an explosion, and the industrious gnomes begin again.]

If anything, Brightblade is too generous to the gnomes, for whom he had a tolerant affection.

Made as they are, gnomes never stop thinking, talking, or inventing. Their schools are scenes of chaos, with every "student" lecturing and no one paying the slightest attention to what anyone else says. Still, more than one visitor has commented on the fact that reading and ciphering are universal among the gnomes. How do they learn? For the first time in these annals, I propose to reveal the origin of gnomish education.

Visitors to the gnome haven of Mt. Nevermind often remark on the vast amount of writing there. Every surface has scratches and scrawls on it; the walls and ceilings of tunnels are covered with random numbers and letters. Gnomes write memoranda on anything that falls to hand, from their shirt cuffs to ostraca and other rubbish. The halls of Mt. Nevermind are littered with this debris, the thoughts of thousands of erratic gnomish brains.

This is the first school of gnomish children.

Youngsters of both sexes are often left on their own at very young ages, or worse, committed to the care of some scatterbrained theorist with a mechanical baby-minder he's just invented. Children will wander, and the rubbish of the tunnels is their bounty. It takes a swift, clever mind to link symbols on paper to words spoken aloud, but the mercurial minds of gnomish children make the connection and have for many generations.

Once old enough to grow a beard (usually around age eight), gnomes can attend technical school. There are many of these, centered around the person of some (self-proclaimed) famous inventor. By all accounts the daily routine of these technical schools consist of the "master" endlessly lecturing while chosen assistants demonstrate his noisy, ineffectual machinery around him. The "students" make loud (and sometime rude) suggestions on how to improve the master's wonderful inventions. This goes on all day, and if the inventive spirit seizes the students, all night as well. [Like all things gnomish, such sessions usually end in an explosion.]

As the amorous poet Lefilo said, "If the song makes them happy, they sing until they die."

Formal education, as such, does not exist among the kender. There is a certain amount of apprenticeship in their country, for skills at picking locks and pockets are best learned from a tolerant master and not by experimentation in a local inn. Reading and numbers are quite widely known among kender, but the subject matter doesn't usually consist of anything more than warning signs and price lists. Many kender never read anything longer than KEEP OUT, BEWARE OF THE DOG, or TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED.

Still, kender are subject to enthusiasms of the moment, even for higher education. It is recorded that during the Peace of Istar (460-280 PC), a kender named Everus Droplid plastered every tree in Hylo with a circular proclaiming:

This sort of thing was irresistible to kender, and many found their way to Gajar's grog shop. Master Droplid, dressed in patched velvet academic robes (bright yellow, alas), received their tuition fees with solemn gravity. No one thought to ask what the marvelous curriculum was, but rumor had it Master Droplid was going to teach his students how to change lead into gold.

The following Waters Day came, and a crowd of nearly 300 gathered under the great vallenwood tree. They waited until the appointed hour, and the schoolmaster never appeared. They waited an hour more, and there was no sign of Droplid. At last someone ran to Gajar's to inquire after the absentminded professor. He was gone. Gajar the barkeep could not tell them where Master Droplid had gone, only that "he departed in a hurry with a wagon, much laden."

In some locales, "kender scholar" is a term used to mean "an impossible thing." No one who knows the clever, resourceful little folk doubt their native wit, but higher thinking is not something they waste time on. In this way, they are opposite to both the gnomes (who think of nothing but useless higher things) and the dwarves (who never waste anything, including thought). [There were, I have heard, attempts by well-meaning idiots to spread literacy among kender after their exile from Kendermore to Hylo. These philanthropists argued that since many kender now suffered from fear, their minds were steadier and more open to formal education. An intrepid band of five itinerate scholars set off from Palanthas to Hylo, armed with books, quills, paper, and the will to succeed. They returned three months later with nothing but the clothes they wore and a severe case of nervous tics and twitches, as well as a tendency to scream loudly for no reason. The venture was deemed a failure.]

It was once common among people of the larger cities, such as Daltigoth, Palanthas, or Schallsea, to regard the plainsmen and their kind as uncivilized barbarians, without education or refined culture. Evidence of the past few years has thoroughly refuted these high-handed notions, most especially the gallant, though ill-fated crusade of the Qué-Shu against the red dragon Malystryx, and the subsequent emergence of the Qué-Shu seeress and Hero of the Lance Goldmoon as one of the great spiritual leaders of our time. People of such stature do not emerge from a low barbarian culture.

That being said, it is true the plainsfolk hold most of their knowledge in spoken form, as tales and lessons handed down from elder to younger. The Qué-Shu make no use of writing, but plainsmen in other lands have learned to use the common script, derived from the ancient Ergothian alphabet. In Qué-Shu proper, plainsfolk sometimes use "story beads," small strips of doeskin on which beaded pictures have been sewn. These bead strips are used as memory aids by Qué-Shu storytellers. Some bead strips are enormously long—the saga "The Life and Death of Karada" is said to make a roll as tall as a man. Usually bead strips are kept in shorter length, and carried about by thrusting a slim rod through the center of each roll.

The Qué-Shu excel in tracking, as befits a sylvan people, but they also have a highly accurate system of surveying the land. Rather than carry cumbersome maps, Qué-Shu hunters and trackers learned to recognize over 500 trail signs, which indicate things such as "fresh water available, 200 paces north," or "this valley is infested with poisonous snakes."

Qué-Shu are expected to update the trails signs if they observe changes. In some mountain passes, signs scratched on rock stretch for yards, chronicling not only the local conditions but also the time the plainsfolk have lived in the region.

Trail signs are taught over the entire life of a plainsman. A young boy or girl may receive instruction in basic trail and weather signs from a grandparent. (It is usually the duty of the grandfather or grandmother to teach the very young what they know.) Other skills such as archery, herbal medicine, cooking, and so on are taught only when the child demonstrates a desire to learn them.

Shamans and seers of all types live among the plainsfolk. In every case, these gifted people were chosen by fate or the departed gods for their role. No one chooses to become a shaman. One day, a person is possessed by the spirit of a god or totem animal. If the bond thus forged is strong, the episode will be repeated many times until the budding shaman learns to summon and dismiss the spirits at will. Seership is more complex. Glimpses of the future may be revealed to a nomad, or they may make earnest efforts to peel back the veil of time and see what will be. The Qué-Shu believe asceticism summons seership. Apprentice seers go off on their own and experience all types of hardship in order to tune their mind to higher forces around them. Cold, starvation, and thirst are not only tolerated, but positively sought after as aids in their spiritual education.

The plainsfolk are the most sensitive people in the whole of Ansalon. Living as they do in the midst of natural and unnatural forces, they must heed signs and portents city-dwellers might never notice. The nomads impart what they can to their young people, but for them life must be experienced. It cannot be taught.

Simpler, homelier skills are taught, of course. The Qué-Shu make excellent arrows and often earn gold fletching for settled folk in Abanasinia. They are not so skilled in metal work, but their woodworking is reckoned first rate. It's not unusual for farmers or villagers to hire Qué-Shu men to build fences and barns. Four Qué-Shu men can turn a pile of tree trunks into a barn in four days without using a single nail or cleat. Carpentry skills are handed down parent to child almost exclusively. It's very hard for the son or daughter of a basket weaver to find anyone willing to teach woodworking. In time, this fashion of family craft skills may lead to the formation of guilds among the nomads.

Every season, some nomads leave the plain and settle in cities and towns west and east of their homeland. Within a generation they are as sedentary as their neighbors, and succumb to the life of settled people.

Education for the human nomads of the plains thus fall into three categories. The basics are taught by their elderly relatives. Older children are guided through further learning by sheer experience. More advanced skills are handed down within families, or in the case of mystical enlightenment, are sought by the seeker in person.

Nomads of less hospitable climes keep their secrets. While inquiries have been made about the lives and learning of the Icewall wanderers, or the sanddwellers of the Plains of Dust, little has been gleaned. Since neither group exists in larger bands than single families, or at most a family clan, it seems likely the older teach the younger what they know.

Neither the ice nomads nor the sanddwellers have a written language, which makes it all the more puzzling to consider that large carved stelae, covered in arcane hieroglyphs, have been reported in the icy wastes of Frisindia. These glyphs do not resemble any known system of writing. A pupil of Astinus, Cottas by name, wrote a short treatise on the hieroglyphs of Frisindia. His original manuscript was lost in the Cataclysm, [That is, it was one of the manuscripts that vanished along with Astinus.] but other scholars refer to it approvingly. Apparently Cottas's theory was that the ice realm was once a temperate place inhabited by a race of intelligent giants. He believed these giants may have been the first thinking inhabitants of Ansalon, the antecedents of the better-known Irda.

Ogres of Blöde give little thought to learning for its own sake. The harsh life of the Khalkist Mountain range gives them little time or pleasure to consider life as anything more than a struggle for existence. Animal husbandly, foraging, and gardening are the tasks given to ogre women and children. Males raid and pillage or else trade for warlike goods on the fringes of human and dwarven settlements. Ogres of Blöde have no written language or numbers, but in some locales they have adopted trail signs and other habits of the Qué-Shu.

The ogres of Kern have a higher culture than their brethren to the southwest. They are just as violent and coarse but are wealthier and more stable. In their settled towns, the Kern ogres have rudimentary guilds that train apprentices in the trades most important to them, namely metal work, rope making, tanning, and butchery. Keeping accounts in their trades requires the Kern ogres to use basic Ergothian numbers and letters.

Minotaurs, despite their fearsome appearance, possess considerable cultural and technical skills. Inhabiting islands in the Blood Sea has lead them into maritime pursuits, at which they excel. Minotaur traders and (let us speak plainly) pirates are masters of shipbuilding and navigation. They use a script derived from the writing of ancient Istar, greatly simplified and cursive. [Using this script, scholars at the library have reconstructed the form of ancient Istarian writings, though almost all Istar's books were destroyed in the First Cataclysm.] The bulk of minotaur literature consists of handbooks of navigation, sea lore, and a kind of rough poetry. Their sagas describe great voyages, terrible storms, and sea battles in vivid, blood-drenched language. There was vogue for minotaur poetry in Palanthas once, and older book shops in the city still stock titles like "The Rage of Captain Edzi" and "Windwave Ballads."

Education among the minotaurs follows the apprentice-master pattern. Formal schools are nonexistent, though minotaurs have occasionally enrolled in schools in foreign lands. There is a line in "The Rage of Captain Edzi" that says, "the fo'c'sle was my school, the sea my education," and that about sums up the minotaurs' experience of learning.

Centaurs of Duntollik live like human nomads, only in their case they are horse and rider in one. They lack writing and numbers. Their chief art form is dance, which can range from the most delicate to the most violent clashes, like barehanded combat. Family is the unit of education among the centaurs; parents and grandparents teach their own what they know about life.

Centaurs have a lordly manner, which does not incline them toward seeking out the knowledge gathered by other races. Though they have trade and social contact with Thorbardin dwarves and Qualinesti elves, the centaurs best relate to human plainsfolk, whose lives their own most resemble.