In Jinling City, Luo Zhixue looked at the report of the joint entrance examination of the four schools that had just ended.
This time, the joint examination of the four schools was an attempt at educational reform that was personally directed by Luo Zhixue, jointly deployed by the Ministry of Ethical Affairs, the Army Military and Political Department, and the Navy Military and Political Department, and implemented by the Ministry of Ethnic Affairs and Education.
Others didn't know it, but Luo Zhixue already regarded this joint entrance examination of the four schools as an attempt to unify the college entrance examination.
The four-school joint examination only covers the provincial level, so the workload is relatively small and easy to control, and any problems can be adjusted in time.
Now according to the report, the results of this joint examination are still good, mainly because a complete set of joint examination systems have been initially explored.
After a few more years of experimentation, and when more colleges and universities are established, the scope of the college entrance examination can be gradually expanded.
After putting down the report, Luo Zhixue said to himself: "Now, it's time to build the primary and secondary school system!"
Now there are four colleges and universities in the Great Chu Empire, but there are still no matching primary and secondary schools. At present, the only way to recruit students is to combine the imperial examinations and recruit students directly from the schools in each county.
However, an institution like the County School does not conform to the scope of a school in the modern sense, because the students in this thing are all composed of talents who have passed the college examination, and the teachers inside are teachers, let alone managers.
The county schools in the pre-Ming Dynasty, and the county schools in the Chu Empire, which did not carry out many reforms after the Great Chu Empire took over, were not schools, but rather scholar management institutions.
This does not meet the requirements of the new education system.
The next day, Luo Zhixue summoned relevant officials from the Ministry of Ethics and Education and proposed the establishment and improvement of new education and the establishment of primary and secondary schools in various places.
Each province must have at least one three-year higher secondary school, each prefecture must have at least one three-year junior high school, each county must have at least one three-year primary school, and each town must have at least one three-year junior primary school. .
As for the states, in the fifth year of Chengshun, the Great Chu Empire had already implemented the abolition of state-level institutions with different levels. Some small states were transformed into counties, and some large states were reformed into prefectures.
As a result, the local administrative system of the Chu Empire became simpler and more unified, consisting of provinces, prefectures, counties, towns and villages.
In order to reduce the cost of implementing new education, it is also to smooth the transition.
The buildings of all county schools and government schools will be transformed into new-style higher primary schools and junior high schools, and the original staff will either be transferred to the county etiquette department or changed to government-run primary and secondary school teachers or administrative staff.
In principle, there will be no layoffs or layoffs, mainly to reduce internal resistance to reform.
If any county school officials find themselves losing their jobs after county schools or government schools are reformed into new-style schools, they will definitely have opinions.
In order to reduce internal resistance as much as possible, especially at the grassroots level, and to maintain local stability and avoid too much turmoil, Luo Zhixue personally instructed to properly arrange the staff of the original county school and the government school.
The government-run primary schools in each town are mainly newly established. This kind of primary school is mainly for enlightenment. It has low requirements for school buildings and teachers, and it does not cost a lot. As long as the documents are issued, then each town will open a primary school. The problem will not be too big for junior primary schools.
As for high schools, due to the problem of insufficient teachers, they will be temporarily run by the provincial etiquette and education department. In terms of teachers, the four major universities will provide certain support.
However, in order to further increase the number of teachers, especially those in science and engineering, Luo Zhixue instructed the Ministry of Ethics and Education to establish a number of normal schools specifically for cultivating educational talents.
In addition, private schools are strongly encouraged to run their own primary education, and existing private schools are reviewed and assessed, registered, and issued relevant school licenses. A unified academic system and student status management are carried out in accordance with the new education system, and students in private schools are provided with Apply for an officially recognized diploma.
At the same time, appropriate financial subsidies will be provided to rural private schools in remote areas, poor areas and difficult to operate.
The various requirements put forward by Luo Zhixue are actually not high. There is only one higher primary school in each county and only one junior middle school in each prefecture.
For the government, it is enough to directly adapt the original county schools and government schools.
In addition, there are actually many academies and colleges in the private sector... and these traditional academies have actually begun to add various new education contents a few years ago!
Why? Because the only purpose of the existence of these academies is to train students to participate in the imperial examinations, and the imperial examinations in the Chu Empire, even from the county examinations, have begun to involve basic science knowledge such as mathematics and physics.
These academies naturally have to study the imperial examination questions and subjects, and then provide targeted education to the students.
Nowadays, many private academies are highly motivated to establish new schools.
And the expected large amount of criticism and dissatisfaction of the scholar class against the new learning... actually did not appear. At most, there were only some old scholars saying that the world was declining, but basically they were scolding and looking for connections everywhere to try to get their sons. Or my grandson will go to those good academies run by new schools!
Why? Again, it doesn't matter what you study, the important thing is to be able to be an official.
After the imperial examination was abolished in the late Qing Dynasty, why did it arouse large-scale opposition from scholars, and students were furious.
It is because the imperial examination was canceled at the end of the Qing Dynasty, but there was no timely supplement and improvement of the civil service examination system... This is not a new education, but a direct blockage of the way for scholars to become officials!
People have studied all their lives just to be an official... Well now, you have canceled the imperial examinations, so it's just a joke. If I don't make a revolution, who else will you revolutionize...
The Great Chu Empire did not cancel the imperial examination. On the contrary, the Great Chu Empire also expanded the enrollment scale of the imperial examination. A large number of so-called scholars were included in the administrative rule system, turning them into their own people...
Although most of them took the college examination and became ninth grade clerks...but this is still an official position, and they can continue to climb up without hindrance. Most scholars are still very satisfied.
After all, most people don't have that much ambition and just want a decent job to support their family in Hukou.
If you are ambitious, you can continue to take the provincial examination and the general examination. If you win the first prize in the examination, you will rise to the top in one step, directly from the sixth rank, and you can also directly enter the Hanlin Academy to work.
The existence of a large number of academies and a large number of small private schools also means that the scale of private education in the Chu Empire is still very large, even much larger than government-run education.
The most important thing is that this does not cost the official money!
Therefore, it is very necessary to encourage and support private education.
After receiving Luo Zhixue's instructions, the Ministry of Ethical Education quickly made a preliminary new education plan based on Luo Zhixue's instructions.
According to this plan, starting from the second half of this year, various localities will enter the preparatory period, and in the spring of next year, all new government-run schools will be set up and enrollment will begin.
Taking into account the first version of the new education system, the early government enrollment will be a bit special. It is easier for elementary schools to recruit school-age children directly in the jurisdiction.
Although there is only one elementary school in the town, there is no need to worry about not being able to meet the demand... because not all school-age children will sign up to go to school...
After the failure of low-fee compulsory education in early education pilots, government-run education no longer follows the path of compulsory education.
Instead, we take the conventional education path. There are tuition fees to study, and they are not cheap. They are about the same level as private schools.
The tuition fees collected are enough to maintain the operation of the town's primary school, and maybe they can earn a little more to build a few more school buildings.
If there are many registrations, then open more classes... You said that the primary school in the town is financially tight, and there are only a few teachers, so it cannot recruit too many students...
Are you kidding me? How long can students hire more teachers and build more school buildings? Fee-based education dislikes those with few students, not those with many.
Even if it is too late in the first year, resulting in insufficient school buildings and insufficient desks, you will not be able to rent buildings or temporarily sign teachers.
In short, a sheep is driven, and a group of sheep is also driven. The more the better, and no one will be refused.
Well, in fact, most town primary schools may not be able to recruit enough students after they open, and it is unlikely that they will be full.
Lower primary schools recruit school-age children, while county higher primary schools and above recruit students from the community first.
We recruit students from various private schools who have undergone enlightenment education, and relatively young students are admitted.
The junior high schools and senior high schools in the prefecture also recruit students directly from the society.
Until a large number of three-year students graduate and apply, these higher-level schools will still have to rely on social recruitment.
In fact, the main force of this so-called social enrollment is also private schools, various private schools and academies.
According to the plan of the Ministry of Ethical Education, all private schools, whether they are small private schools or large-scale famous academies, need to register and subsequently teach according to the academic system set by the Ministry of Ethical Education. The four-level three-year academic system is also implemented, that is, at the beginning of the third year Primary school, three years of high school, three years of junior high school, and three years of high school.
At the same time, some well-known private academies are also allowed to apply to establish private colleges and universities.
However, the admissions system of all private colleges and universities must also be integrated into the admissions system of government-run schools, and they cannot recruit students privately as in the past.
The implementation of this series of new education systems requires a half-year preparation period and will be officially launched tomorrow spring. However, it does not require that it be implemented in one step. Instead, it is necessary to set up a framework first and then gradually improve it.
These are all matters related to basic education, and will not have any obvious effect on the development of science and technology in the short term. The development of science and technology in the Chu Empire still needs to be promoted by the Ordnance Department of the Army Officers Academy and the Royal Institute of Technology.
"God's Coming"
Especially for the Royal Institute of Technology, although the school has only been in operation for a few years, it has high-quality students and rigorous teaching, plus a group of early Luo Zhixue personally trained, as well as students who have been exposed to Western learning and various students who understand science and technology. The Western missionaries quickly trained a group of basic technical talents in just a few years.
Lin Mijian is one of them, and he is also the best one!
As a child of a famous pirate family, he spent his childhood in Indonesia. He played with cannons and guns, and even sailed out to sea with his friends...
Of course, more importantly, he received basic Western learning in Indonesia.
A few years ago, his father followed Zheng Zhilong and surrendered to the empire. He transformed from a pirate captain to a lieutenant commander in the navy of the Dachu Empire!
Lin Mijian also returned to China with his father. Not long after, he was recommended to apply for the Royal Institute of Technology because he had studied Western learning and was very smart. After successfully passing the exam, he showed his amazing learning talent, especially in chemistry. protrude.
He beat his classmates all the way, and finally passed the graduation exam and stayed in school to teach.
At this time, Lin Mijian was only fifteen years old...but he was already a full-level lecturer at the Royal Institute of Technology!
When he was in class, the students below him were all older than him...
However, this does not prevent him from teaching while also leading a group of students to conduct various chemical researches. Among his research projects, the key project is steel smelting.
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The development of science and technology is inseparable from the development of materials.
With a variety of suitable excellent materials, various mechanical equipment can be produced, and with various mechanical equipment and materials, various specific application products can be produced.
The production of artillery is a very typical example.
To produce artillery, you need qualified materials. It doesn’t matter whether it is an iron-cast artillery or a bronze artillery. Let’s not talk about the barrel for now. Let’s just talk about the shell of the grenade. The material cannot withstand the chamber pressure, so we can only use it. The cartridge case is made thicker, and if it is thicker, the internal charge will be less, and the explosion power will be smaller. At the same time, if it is too thick, it will be more difficult to process the prefabricated fragments, and it will be difficult to produce a large number of fragments after the explosion.
However, if there are excellent cartridge case materials, such as steel with stronger pressure resistance, then many problems can be solved.
The processing also has extremely high requirements on materials. The bronze artillery produced by the Dachu Empire today adopts the method of finishing after casting. The integrated hollow barrel is first cast, and then a large hydrodynamic boring machine is used to enlarge the diameter of the barrel and precision. Processed to make the inside of the barrel smoother and maintain a high degree of uniformity in caliber.
This places high demands on the material of the boring machine's tool head. The performance of the tool material is not good, but it cannot complete continuous high-intensity processing.
Not only the production of artillery, muskets, armor and even bayonets and other types of weapons and equipment products are heavily dependent on material performance.
At present, the most used and widely used material is naturally steel.
Steel smelting is also a key research project at the Royal Institute of Technology. It is not only researched by the chemistry department, but also the physics department and mechanization department will participate.
A series of steel smelting projects are all key research projects.
Lin Mijian, on the other hand, is responsible for steel smelting issues. It is not that he is not responsible for the specific production process, but for the deep-seated principle issues.
The reason why Lin Mijian was able to graduate quickly and stay at the school to teach was because in June this year, he proved through experiments that the fine steel made by craftsmen was not pure iron, but a mixture of iron and other substances. Among these other substances is the carbon element Your Majesty mentioned.
However, the experimental conditions are limited, and the theoretical conditions are also very limited. Although they already know that iron, carbon and other substances will produce various properties when combined with each other, they still cannot verify the specific proportions in detail through experiments...
They can't even analyze now, apart from iron and carbon, what other remaining substances are in the steel created by the craftsmen, and what role they play.
Research on steel smelting is still in a very primitive stage at the current stage.
There is no way, now the Da Chu Empire can’t even come up with a complete table of elements...
Luo Zhixue told the early students that there are a lot of elements such as iron, carbon, sulfur, etc. But the question is, what are these elements? What characteristics does it have?
Some of the common elements were fine, and Luo Zhixue could explain them to them based on his memory, but Luo Zhixue actually couldn't remember many things clearly... After all, it was no longer time for him to take the college entrance examination, and besides, he was still in school. I majored in liberal arts, so once I passed the college entrance examination, it was basically in the back of my mind... A lot of high school knowledge had already been memorized.
There is a more critical issue: empty talk without any basis!
Looking at a piece of steel, Luo Zhixue told the students that in addition to iron, there is also carbon in steel, and various messy elements may be mixed in during the smelting process.
However, it is actually very difficult to conduct specific measurements or even microscopic observations.
The test equipment is not good, and many tests cannot be done with it.
Therefore, although Luo Zhixue personally taught many students in the early days, he mostly did some popular science and then remembered everything he still remembered based on direct memory.
How to learn this theoretical knowledge and transform it into practical results requires a large number of teachers, students and technical personnel to continue to think of ways.
How should I put it? At least all kinds of test instruments must be obtained before relevant tests can be conducted. Only with successful tests can accurate values be obtained, and then they can be applied to production.
Lin Mijian and the others actually do these things, but Lin Mijian prefers theory and some cutting-edge experiments.
Although Lin Mijian has not been able to explain the microscopic phenomena of steel in detail at the principle level so far, it does not prevent him from drawing a basic conclusion through many comparative experiments: the less carbon the steel contains, the softer it is. The higher the carbon content, the harder the steel. If you want to get steel suitable for making various weapons or mechanical equipment, you need to control the carbon content in the steel.
At the same time, he also proved that there is carbon in the air, and the charcoal or coal used for heating also contains carbon, so he put forward suggestions that by controlling the intake of carbon in various production links, iron with different hardness can be obtained.
Of course, these basic theories are not enough. It is actually difficult to control the carbon intake during the production process. We can only come up with an optimal production process through repeated adjustments in the actual production process.
Specific to the production process, Zi Neng left it to the steel mills to explore on their own.
Despite this, Lin Mijian's research on steel has brought great inspiration and help to the steel industry.
In the past, I did it randomly, and I did it based on experience. I knew how to do it, but I didn't know why I did it.
Now that they know something, they can improve production equipment in a targeted manner.
This is actually of little use to the improvement of steel production in the Dachu Empire... but it has a considerable effect on the improvement of iron production, mainly by building taller iron-blowing furnaces that use water-powered blowers.
In this way, large quantities of iron materials can be produced.
If you want to further obtain steel with better performance, that is, iron-carbon alloy steel with both hardness and toughness, then reprocessing is necessary.
At present, the Da Chu Empire uses the method of frying steel... Of course, it is not the manual frying of steel in the past, which is too inefficient and difficult to control... The Da Chu Empire uses large-scale mechanical power to fry steel.
In this way, steel can be produced in batches. Of course, this batch size is compared with previous pure manual production and is far from being comparable to the steel production of later generations.
At present, the amount of steel in the Da Chu Empire is still very limited, which is far from meeting the production needs.
Except, the mechanical steel frying method developed by several large steel plants based on the traditional steel frying method... the quality of the steel produced is actually not very good, impurities are not completely removed, and the overall hardness is not high.
In later generations, it should be regarded as inferior low carbon steel.
In the steel world of the Da Chu Empire, it is called mild steel.
At present, the Chu army's various breastplates, bayonets, waist knives and other cold weapons and armors produced in various standards are basically made of this mild steel.
In addition to the mechanical steel-frying method, in fact, ironmaking plants often use other processes developed based on traditional steel-making methods, but the output is the same as the steel-frying method, and both are limited.
At present, the steel production in the Dachu Empire, especially the production of steel products, is in full bloom, with all kinds of messy methods.
There are stirring methods that have touched the threshold of industrial production, there are also purely manual steel-frying methods, and there are crucible steel-making methods... Basically, the steel-making methods that can be found in China in the past, no matter what they are, good or bad , basically all were dug out by the officials of the Great Chu Empire, and then the technology was sorted out and the principles were studied and analyzed.
But in the end, I found that many messy steel-making methods are similar, either to reduce carbon or to increase carbon, but the methods used are different.
As large-scale hydrodynamic blowing furnaces continue to be built, the subsequent output of pig iron will definitely increase. Therefore, the steel industry is focusing on the research of decarbonized steel.
In this regard, Daye Iron and Steel Plant is at the forefront!
After all, they were the first to use large-scale water-powered blowing furnaces. Their various production outputs soared, and they also brought a large amount of pig iron.
Although these pig irons can be directly used in the casting of specific products, such as artillery, they are still very difficult to use.
They urgently need a way to decarburize the mass-produced pig iron and then process it into steel.
Lin Mijian is now providing them with some theoretical research results to help them develop a new generation of steelmaking methods.
It's just that this work will be very long, and it is unlikely to be successful in a short time.
