There are actually a lot of modern examples we can look at to illustrate how industrialization and education efforts can change a populace in a relatively short period. Despite the artificial cultural differences on Safehold, there are a lot of parallels between much of the freer portions of the planet and the so-called ‘Four Tigers’ (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan).
That said, you need to accept that you aren’t going to magically educate the entire populace to a common, 20th century standard even without the need to tiptoe around religious sensibilities. What you can do for existing adults is increase their overall productivity and push for at least some degree of basic literacy and applied knowledge. You want to decrease the amount of labor needed to feed the population, and shift the surplus workforce to factories in order to spur economic growth and generate the tax revenue necessary for infrastructure projects. Relevant to this thread, more efficient agriculture practices lessen the need for child labor at home while industrialization increases the average person’s income and purchasing power. It also preempts what has—historically—been the most common criticism of compulsory schooling during its initial introduction: the loss of free, built-in labor on the farm.
In other words, you use the labor force you have—trying to improve it as best you can—to support a major shift in the next generation. As one naturally dies off, it’s replace by a significantly better educated one.
Anyhow, during their occupation by Japan in WW2, each of the Four Tigers saw either the creation of a western-styled education systems much like their own (Taiwan, South Korea) or additional support for existing schooling systems developed under British colonial rule (Hong Kong, Singapore). The education system reforms didn’t mitigate the damages and problems born out under occupation, but they did provide significant long-term benefits that other developing nations lacked with their traditional schooling systems. You can see evidence of that in developing nations in Africa today. Even countries that have made significant efforts to reform their schooling systems face problems, often on a region-by-region level: look at
rural China, certain areas of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA/WANA) for a variety of reasons,
much of Brazil/other BRIC nations, etc.
Building education systems from the ground up—and that’s more or less what Charis has to do in territory under its control or influence—isn’t cheap or easy, but this is where those economic factors come into play. There’s going to be an immense post-war economic boom, and that’s before you even consider the Inner Circle’s ability to work with Owl to analyze trends and make subtle adjustments where needed. Education improvements alone would see a significant increase in Solow residuals.
But education is about more than just primary and secondary education. Their short-term goals (say, 1-5 years) are fairly straight-forward: increase basic literacy and numeracy amongst the general population, and provide the job-retraining necessary to get people safely working in factory environments. Long-term, the goal is to get children in an educational environment that fosters critical thinking and reasoning skills. They can’t undermine the Proscriptions or Langhorne directly with that schooling, but they can lay the groundwork so that 20 years down the line Charis has an entire generation able to start thinking critically when the ‘Truth’ is revealed. The goal is to enable people to say “well, maybe…that’s odd” after the initial shock and knee-jerk denial is over.
As for the introduction of ‘new’ concepts and ideas, the Royal College’s reputation for rigorous experimentation gives them a great deal of options for creating a false trail for anyone trying to track where all the newfangled ideas are coming from. The slowly expanding Inner Circle, including the academics that have been fully briefed, doesn’t have to introduce *every* major concept to Safehold. They just have to introduce key concepts that serve as signposts, so to speak, for non-members to run from. That both avoids a small group being the source of everything for reasons already well-established with Merlin, and fosters the sort of independent logical thinking that will be critical for the Reveal.
I think it’s likely we’d see an increase in the Royal College’s size, and additional campuses in different EoC territories and Siddarmark. We might even see Charis-inspired (or even backed) schooling throughout many areas of Safehold as other rulers start to realize the gap between their economies and Charis. If those other nations want to stay within shouting distance economically, they’re going to have to jump on the tiger’s back.
On that note, some areas--like Old Charis and Siddar--have additional advantages; most especially, significant foreign trade, cultural exchange, and relative social mobility. On the other hand, places like Desnair and Harchong on the mainland are almost the exact opposite: trade is limited and heavily restricted, caste systems (or even outright slavery) drastically limit worker productivity, and the existing social structures disincentive any sort of change to the status quo.
