world building and you - educating your foal · 12:31am Jan 15th, 2012
When you're building a world - and this is very, very easy to forget until you work out you needed something way back, and going back to sneak it in would mean a massive rewrite - you need to know how various parts of it work, especially if they differ to your current world.
One such for this in Equestria is education. Brace yourself for a tl;dr of a blogpost. If you don't want to read it, then have a nice day!
The western world, such as it is, prides itself on offering an egalitarian education for all children. It falls short very often, yes - I'm not interested in talking about failure to plan ahead and create the future geniuses that our world needs. I want instead to talk about Equestria (in this case) and how it doesn't match either the vision of our current system nor the reality.
First of all, it's quite clear that Equestria is highly stratified in terms of class and race, but that the general level of education offered is high. Every foal goes to school, they all learn reading, writing and arithmetic, and some obviously go to higher education schools.
The thing that strikes me as most probable, however, is that unlike our world, they have guilds that will teach certain knowledge only to certain races and classes of pony. Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, for example, obviously doesn't cater to earth ponies or pegasi. It's quite clear to me that this means earth ponies do manual labour most of the time. They cook, clean, build, sculpt, farm and pull. They cannot work magic, so quite probably they don't get the chance to learn about it. Why would they? It will never, ever, be any use to them. Celestia's school, with all the best intentions, could waste time and money offering placements to earth ponies but not a single one of them could cast the simplest of light spells.
Likewise, despite their great powers, no unicorn could ever fly as far or as fast as a pegasus, so I'm pretty sure there exists the pegasus version of Celestia's School. I do wonder if there is some air general (seeing as the army seemed to be pegasi, however I would have all three races of pony in the army for a well-rounded response) running an elite school for the best fliers out there. Not a single place will be given to earth ponies or unicorns, however. Most pegasi will tend to the weather, wherever that may be, they won't be much use growing things or building as they don't have the faculties for it.
So do the earth ponies get shafted? Probably, yes. The fiddliest technology, the most esoteric of reasonings, the secrets of the universe, all of this belongs entirely to the unicorn. The nicest laziest jobs belong to the pegasus. The hard, dirty, long, dangerous jobs all seem to belong to the working-class earth pony with the ivory-tower engineers being the unicorns.
For me, this builds a more believable world - the pegasi have their weather-machines, and no non-pegasi will ever know exactly how they work. The unicorns have their deep dark secrets - after all, if it were common knowledge that ponies could be turned to stone or set on fire or turned into potted plants, no unicorn would be let out of the site of some sworn protector of the peace able and willing to subdue a rogue agent. The earth ponies, likewise, have their secrets. To me, I think they guard their secrets more heavily than any other. I think this is something which naturally keeps Equestria from advancing, and even if the knowledge could be shared, the nature of the three races makes even really understanding such things - it being magic, after all, more than science - forms a barrier.
I don't mean the factions are warring (although you could take things that way), but that most earth ponies won't end up as stargazers, and it is usually earth ponies who tend to rocks or to the sick. We do, however, see fluttershy who looks after animals, and nurse redheart who looks after other ponies, and rarity who makes dresses. The oranges, even, were rich. Very rich.
So this means that essential services from each race are probably in the hands of specific members of that race - maybe these guilds work together, but I am quite sure that they hold back Equestria relatively effectively from advancing, and knowledge is relatively easily lost. This is what has propelled our western society to global dominance - the open sharing of ideas and information from every and any facet of learning with any other.
Don't get me wrong, Equestrian society works better than ours (knowing what you're good at most of the time would mean nopony has a job they hate unless they're really, really unlucky), but there are things I'd change.
If I'm to write a story about Equestria within that framework, the interesting stories comes from the edge cases - conflict once again. The pegasus who wants to farm, the math-whiz earth pony, the unicorn who is inept at magic but can make flowers bloom. It's also interesting fishing around for places where guilds would fail, or cutie-marks would be a two-edged sword.
Anyway, long, rambling, potentially interesting. that's what you get at 2:30am.
I'm learning so much today
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Nice to see you coming up with story ideas for Ponies that are, for lack of a better term. Misfits. I actually see Scootaloo as a bit of a misfit in Equestria since most Pegasi live in cloud cities, granted Ponyville is a mixed community but if Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy are any indication, then most Pegasi spend their Foalhood with their head in the clouds
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It would be interesting to see you do a story of an Earth Pony who wants to study Magic and Magical theory, like the Dwarf Magi Dagna in Dragon Age: Origins. The Earth Pony can't do magic but I don't see why I can't study it scenario. This could actually lead to some sort of innovation you were mentioning earlier that Equestria was lacking.
Also like you said about the Pegasi farmer is a very workable scenario, Pegasi are knowledgeable about weather patterns and I can see a Pegasi that puts his/her mind to it being a good farmer or farmhand.
What would be really interesting is seeing three innovative minds, from each of the Pony races. Come together to find ways to make inventions that would change and revolutionize the world. And then have guilds try to pressure them into joining or closing down, assuming Equestria operates on a guild based system. It could be a lot like one of my favourite Terry Pratchett, Discworld Novels: The Truth.
An excellent read, will definitely be looking at this again when the time comes to write my sequel
I actually have pondered the idea of an Earth pony who was very well-educated in the facts and rhythms and details of magic. He cannot perform it himself, no, but he knows a lot about it. I thought of it mostly to subvert expectations for simple humor. (The character, in my mind, is usually a botanist/chemist/pharmacist, actually...)
You raise very good points that make too much sense to ignore.
Though, with such very wealthy Earth ponies such as the Oranges, Filthy Rich and his daughter Diamond Tiara, and all those stuck-up jerks in Canterlot, I have to wonder what they do that can earn them so much posh success...
Looking at history lessons, it looks like unicorns are the scholars, the politicians, the high-educated; pegasi are the soldiers, the law, the knights, the chivalrous; and Earth ponies are the serfs, the merchants, the artisans...but it's not as simple as that, either.
I don't really agree. I think if you look at what we know about Manehatten, we can see that it's mostly Earth ponies that live there. And in Canterlot, it's mostly unicorns, and Cloudsdale is obviously only Pegasi. But Manehatten has it's share of upper class just as Canterlot does, but we see Canterlot far more often, for several different reasons. For this reason, people seem to make the assumption that the upper class is all unicorns, and forget about the Rich Douchebag Earth pony who doesn't even know what a rooster is. I think we can assume that there is ponies of high and low class of each race.
Personally, I think that the cities of Equestria have different populations of the three races. Ponyville seems to be a fairly even mix of the three, it's probably right in between the three cities. I don't think the race of the ponies has as much effect as people seem to think.
This is an awesome analysis and one I totally agree with.
More than this, I can see Celestia setting things up this way to stabilize the world, to keep it from changing, to retard technological and magical progress - indeed to halt such progress entirely. For the preservation of everything and everypony.
Unrestrained progress in magic would -must- lead to effective godhood one day, destroying what Equestria is forever. The same could be said about sufficient technological advancement which would be indistinguishable from magic.
Unlike our hostile universe, Equestria is a supporting one, by comparison. In a hostile universe, advancement and change are the path to better survival, in a comfortable universe, it seems stability and unchangingness would be the path to optimal survival.
These are my thoughts.
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I actually outright state that there are rich earth ponies, so maybe I should clarify what I mean by education.
Our society educates all our kids - or tries to, or claims to - to a degree which is astonishing if you went back three hundred years or so. Barring willful ignorance and the poorest of areas, every child can read (the fact we hear stories about many not being able to is a sad testament to modern day malaise), they will generally know facts about our world and the universe which would have boggled the mind of the average serf several hundred years ago (even ignoring the difference in knowledge, the sheer capability was unknown to count or read beyond the most rudimentary of one-two-three-many type maths).
More than that, we drill them with history, philosophy, foreign languages, mechanics - a host of things which the average serf would never need. As my wife is fond of saying (and it drives me fucking nuts because it just sounds so ignorant) "what do I need with long division?" - you can guess who helps with our kids' homework, but I digress.
In Equestria, the kids learn similarly to our society - but past that, the higher learning centres are most likely (and in some canon cases definitely are) race-specific.
Special magic, advanced flying techniques, agriculture - all of this non-general, specific specialist knowledge is most definitely locked away, maybe not because it must be, but because it just is.
That compartmentalization - and each author is free to take that as far as he or she feels necessary (indeed, breaking out of it is more fascinating) - will affect things. Humans need lots of special gadgets to allow us to differentiate, ponies don't. Earth ponies don't need to fly like pegasi, and unicorns can already do magic, and earth ponies are already strong with green hooves.
It begs the question of whether ponies have tried to cross their species' boundaries - obviously some do as there does exist the cloud-walking spell on top of the wing-granting spell, but are there earth-pony mages who control the seasons and the world like a unicorn? Are there pegasi-mages who can control the elements? Are there unicorns with green thumbs that can self-levitate, and if not, why not?
What I mean is that magic is a property of their universe not limited to only unicorns, yet Celestia's school was specifically for gifted unicorns, so there are whole branches of thaumaturgy that must remain unexamined. The same is likely true for horticulture and flight/weather (remember, Twilight dismissed the book that Zecora used - if she'd known about the magic plants, the entire episode would have been different).
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This is the idea that comes to mind, but it is also worrying. Does Celestia sit on an eternal throne, shepherding her ponies through alternating cycles of high magic and dark ages? Does she seek to maximize happiness even whilst minimizing change? Health and living a full life would not require the same niceties in Equestria as on Earth, so even collapse of great states would cause far less pandemonium. So there's suddenly less trading partners as giant cities empty to be returned to fallow fields... as long as she doesn't descend on high to snuff out promising research then she is merely cautiously maintaining the status quo.
That may be the ultimate curse and blessing of Equestria. Order.