Yang Yiqing, the secretary of the Ministry of Rites, replaced Ma Wensheng and was awarded the title of secretary of the military department and the governor of the right capital of Hetao by Zhu Houzhao, in order to continue to strengthen the empire's rule and development of the Hetao.

Yang Yiqing is an official who is good at managing the army and leading the troops, and the exaggerated incident of the Anhua King Rebellion made Zhu Houzhao deeply realize that Yang Yiqing, an official who yearns to go to the drill camp, is not suitable to stay in the capital, and staying in the big dye vat of the capital will only make a general only know the power of internal struggle, and it is better to send him to the border town to make contributions.

Of course, let Yang Yiqing replace Ma Wensheng to sit in the Hetao, but also because the Zhengde Emperor Zhu Houzhao did not want the Ming Dynasty to stop at the Hetao, although the current Mo Nan and Mo North and even further north are not very worthy of occupation and development for the Ming Dynasty, but in the future it is a very worthy of development, especially in Siberia, which is rich in natural gas resources.

However, now Zhu Houzhao has to turn his attention to the south, and there is no need for the north to expand before the empire does not have enough financial and military strength, which will only consume the empire's financial resources, and it has no value, and it has become a sign of reckless military force in the mouth of civilian officials.

Zhu Houzhao knew that the strategic focus of the empire had to be shifted from land to sea, because it was now the Age of Discovery, and from now on, the progress of civilization and the accumulation of wealth would come from the sea, and even the real crisis would come from the sea.

But for a while, Zhu Houzhao didn't know what else he, the emperor, could do for the empire to dominate the sea, the soft sailing ship that was more suitable for sailing at sea and had a faster speed had already begun to be built in the Zhijiang Shipyard, and the treasure ship when Zheng He went to the West was also in the process of restoration, and the Nanjing Ministry of Industry was specially ordered to look for good wood in the South Seas.

Lin Tingxuan, the governor of Liangguang, was also ordered to train sailors in Liangguang.

Zhu Houzhao found that the only thing that the empire lacked now was the talents who would recreate the glory of the empire's maritime career.

The first is to educate people.

In order for the Ming Dynasty to have more navigation talents to open up shipping routes for the Ming Dynasty, and more generals to dominate the four seas for the Ming Dynasty, there must be more training bases for such talents, and the premise is that more educational talents who are proficient in navigation knowledge and naval warfare are needed.

But the current Ming Dynasty does not have professionals who specialize in teaching navigation knowledge and naval warfare, not even Beijing Normal University.

Of course, there are still talents who are good at navigation and even water warfare in the Ming system, and even relevant materials are also rich in maritime combat and navigation experience, such as Zheng He's valuable drawings and documents on his seven voyages to the West.

But most of these talents need Zhu Houzhao to discover statistics by himself.

Zhu Houzhao plans to organize this group of maritime talents one day in the future and first build a maritime school to train maritime talents.

This maritime school is mainly responsible for the teaching of maritime knowledge and skills, and is not responsible for initiation and basic education.

What Zhu Houzhao can imagine is that once this maritime school is completed, one of the problems it will face will be that there will be no students to recruit.

Because if you recruit illiterate civilian children, the maritime school has to first enlighten and educate them, and it will take three or four years of hard work.

And those literate scholars and Confucian scholars who have not sharpened their heads and want to take the entrance examination for the Jinshi, everything is inferior, but the consciousness of reading is deep-rooted for them, especially the young scholars and Confucian students, and no one wants to engage in the road other than the profession.

This is also the reason why Jingshi University only allows students from Jinshi to apply, because those from Jinshi have no pressure to raise their careers, and their learning is more free.

Zhu Houzhao sometimes really wanted to abolish the imperial examination directly, but he was worried that once the imperial examination was abolished, the Shilin class would completely break with himself, the emperor, and even no longer had the last illusion about his Ming Dynasty, after all, he was tantamount to taking away the advancement of others.

What's more, before a better promotion system for the people at the bottom is established, his own abolition of the imperial examination will also break the thoughts of the common people in the world, especially the majority of the common landlords.

For the people of the empire, although the admission rate of the imperial examination is low, there is a hope that Tian Shelang will ascend to the Tianzi Hall in the evening, and there is no need to rebel because there is no hope.

Zhu Houzhao felt that the only thing he could do was to increase the investment in enlightenment education and basic education, and turn more Ming people, especially young people and children, into literate people with a certain level of knowledge, so that there would be more scholars who were not satisfied with the status quo, and the imperial examinations with a low admission rate would no longer be able to meet their needs for success, and more students would inevitably be willing to choose maritime or other ways to achieve success.

As long as he can make the people realize that participating in the maritime affairs of the empire will have a good income and good political prospects.

The same is true for other industries.

But now we can only start with universal education.

After the salt policy reform of "collecting grain for salt" and the rule of officials during the Qingming Dynasty, the empire saved a lot of military expenditure on grain transportation.

The opening of border trade increased the income of the border towns and the central court of the empire.

Qingzhang acres of land allowed the empire to have more taxes, and in a short period of time, it increased the income of money and grain worth millions of taels at once, coupled with the bumper harvest of the border towns of Tuntian and Hetao, the tax and grain income of the empire's household department increased to 30 million stones! This is close to the grain income of the empire in the heyday of Hongwu Yongle.

Coupled with the silver income earned by the royal industry and the mineral development of Yulin City, the current treasury income of the Ming Dynasty has even exceeded that of any period in the history of the Ming Dynasty.

It is precisely because of such strong financial support that Zhu Houzhao was able to increase investment in education.

Seven years of Zhengde, the beginning of the new year.

Zhu Houzhao officially issued an edict, ordering the governors and school envoys in various localities to expand social studies, and required that each village must have a social school, and the old social studies that have been abandoned will be reopened, and the newly built villages and towns without social studies will immediately open social studies.

In addition, social science is included in the academic administration system, which is jointly managed by the county and the student envoy;

Mr. Sociology is given to the same person who has been teaching for four years and can directly take the examination;

Social studies allow more than one gentleman, and social studies have a principal, who is given a background in nine products.

At the same time, Zhu Houzhao decided to divide the power of the Ministry of Rites, and set up a separate school department for the academic affairs in charge of the Department of Ritual and Qing Officials, and Kang Hai was appointed as the secretary of the school department, leading the imperial school administration, and changing the division of six departments that had been implemented for thousands of years.

For this kind of institutional reform, the opposition caused is not big, at most the officials of the Ministry of Rites will feel that their power is divided, but now Yang Yiqing, the secretary of the Ministry of Rites, has just been transferred to the governor of the border town, and the officials of the Ministry of Rites system have been greatly reduced because of the killing of Zhang Sheng and Mao Cheng, the two Shangshu of the Ministry of Rites, so that after the establishment of the School Department now, the Ministry of Rites does not dare to disobey Zhu Houzhao's intentions.

However, in order to achieve the goal of streamlining the administration of the army, Zhu Houzhao also issued a special edict to merge Taichang Temple, Guanglu Temple, and Honglu Temple into the Ministry of Rites, and ordered the cabinet to re-establish the affairs of the Ministry of Rites, and clarify specific etiquette matters and foreign affairs.

Since then, education has not only been a matter of the ministry, that is, the Ministry of Rites, but the affairs of the imperial court, which is directly managed by the emperor through the school.

As the first official to go to Beijing Normal University for further study as a high-ranking official of the fourth grade or above, Kanghai, the first Shangshu of the Faculty, also understood the importance of education, and even the specific reform of social studies and the reform of the school system were completed by him himself.

For example, it is required that county scholars can directly enter the county school, and after five years of county school, they can directly take the government examination, and after three years of government education, they can directly take the college examination.

According to the existing financial resources of the Ming Dynasty, after the cabinet discussed with the household department and the school department, Zhu Houzhao decided to implement a four-year compulsory education system in social studies, and the finance was allocated by the central court.

In addition, in order to express the revitalization of the Meizhi school and the smooth implementation of compulsory education, Zhu Houzhao decreed that the Royal Taxation Bureau should allocate 30% of the tax revenue to the school every year to use it as a special fee for the Meizhi school, and the imperial treasury should also allocate the corresponding income to the school.

Because the examination law takes political performance as the only criterion for promoting officials, so studying politics is the most active thing for magistrates, and now the imperial court has allocated a lot of money to help students naturally more local officials are more positive responses, and the people are not opposed, after all, they also know that studying is a good thing.

But in fact, this is not the case, low-income families are still reluctant to send their children to school, at least not all children, after all, they need enough labor to increase the income of the family, even if it is for the rich man to herd a cow.

Although the government is free, it is implemented, and some low-level officials and officials continue to collect money in the name of book fees, pen and ink fees, etc., so for a while, although the imperial court invested a lot of money, there are not many civilian children who can really enter the school to study for a while.

Even some low-level officials and officials, in order to cope with the inspection above, forcibly arrested the children of the common people to study in social studies, and at the same time forced the children of the common people to pay the fees, so that the children of the common people did not enjoy the favor of free education in the imperial court.

Zhu Houzhao was naturally not polite when he heard about it, and directly ordered these officials and officials to be executed, and after killing several batches of them, many of the officials and officials below were also much more honest.

In any case, despite the policies at the top and countermeasures at the bottom, and although the actual implementation effect at the local level was different from the original intention of the central court, in the end, there were still many children of ordinary families who had the opportunity to receive education.

Yan Song began to conscientiously abide by the implementation of compulsory compulsory education issued by the imperial court after serving as the governor of Nanzhili, and unlike other places, he also strictly followed the will of the imperial court to add two subjects of arithmetic and general knowledge in social science, and required that since the seventh year of Zhengde, the students of Nanzhili will take two additional subjects of arithmetic and general knowledge.

The gentry in Jiangnan were extremely disgusted by this, and they contacted local officials to impeach Yan Song, which was putting the cart before the horse, betraying Confucianism and ordering students to learn the ninth-rate learning.

However, Zhu Houzhao was not disgusted by this, and on the grounds that the literary style in the Nanzhili area was concentrated, Yan Song was allowed to carry out a new academic and political reform in Jiangnan, and asked the school to add arithmetic to the examination and the palace examination presided over by the school, and even had to take a general knowledge test, so as to avoid that most of the future Jinshi only knew the Four Books and the Five Classics.

Zhu Houzhao made such a statement, and the whole country was in an uproar! They all thought that this was a move to disrupt the country, and some of the great Confucians even said that they and their disciples would no longer participate in the imperial examinations, as a way to express their protest against the imperial court's excessive emphasis on non-Confucian learning.

Li Youmin, the head of the Heshan Academy in Nanzhili, openly stated in the newspapers and periodicals run by the Jiangnan locality that the students of his academy and himself would not participate in the township examination of the next subject of Nanzhili, in order to express his protest against Yan Song, the governor of Nanzhili, who did not respect Confucianism alone.

Yan Song, the governor of Nanzhili, was different from Wang Yangming, and he did not deal with it by force, but only issued a notice in the newspaper saying that the next township test had been held for the court's permission and the recruitment of 30 people was expanded.

And because of this, when the Nanzhili Township Examination arrived, Li Youmin's students referred to it one after another, and even no less than ten people passed the exam.

The same is true of other scholars who threatened not to take the scientific examination in order to resist the increase of arithmetic and common sense, and most of them said that they would still come to the examination obediently when it was time to take the exam.

Li Youmin was extremely annoyed by this, and directly threatened that those who entered his academy in the future would not be allowed to participate in the scientific examination, claiming that he would only accept people who were dedicated to the Confucian way of Confucius and Mencius as students.

As a result, there were very few new scholars who signed up for Heshan Academy, and Li Youmin finally had to admit that most people still study for fame and fortune, and there are not many people who are really willing to study, but because of this, he feels more and more that he and the nobility of his academy, and he and the students in his academy who are still sticking to it think of themselves as high.

After Zhu Houzhao established a new school department and reformed the academic government and established a new academic system, there were many people like Li Youmin who were stubborn and would rather abandon scientific research than respect Confucianism, but as more and more people learned new learning, they also became more and more outliers and were shunned by the mainstream of society.

These stubborn Confucians were no longer welcomed by the rulers of the empire, and they could no longer be summoned by the emperor to be taken care of by the imperial court for their good governance and sage studies, so that these great Confucians were more or less dissatisfied with the imperial court.

King Ning took this opportunity to recruit more such Confucians, which made him feel more and more excited, and under the boasting of some Confucians, he thought that he was the desire of the people of the world, so he was more determined to rebel.

In order to gain more support from Confucianism, King Ning became more and more courteous and courteous, and became more and more intoxicated with the way of Confucianism.

The Kong family also began to look at King Ning, but this Kong family, as an experienced family of traitors, naturally did not easily get on the thief ship of Zhu Chenhao, the king of Ning, and only temporarily had some business dealings with King Ning.

But in any case, because King Ning's pursuit of merit and respect for Confucianism and Confucius were in stark contrast to Emperor Zhu Houzhao's behavior of studying miscellaneous scriptures and even reforming his studies and politics, more and more Confucians joined King Ning's curtain.

Zhu Houzhao began to find that with the seven-year academic and political reform of Zhengde, there were more and more praises about King Ning among the government and the opposition, especially some Confucians with relatively low political intelligence began to publicly praise King Ning as a virtuous king.

King Ning himself didn't realize that the more high-profile he was, the easier it was to rebel and fail, but he felt that the easier it was to succeed, in his opinion, what Zhu Houzhao couldn't do, as long as he could do it, he could prove that he was more suitable to be a good emperor than Zhu Houzhao.

Therefore, when King Ning heard that Zhu Houzhao had accepted a few more palace maids and did not go to court for several days and only frolicked in the harem, he became more and more happy and felt that his great cause could be accomplished.

And few of the staff who followed King Ning had real talent and learning, and they also belittled Zhu Houzhao and boasted about King Ning, and there were even more crazy than King Ning who demanded that King Ning raise troops to rebel now.