Dai Yan's reform of agriculture was all aimed at enhancing the war potential of the Song State. The higher the grain production, the more soldiers the Song State could raise, and the larger the scale of future wars.

In Dai Yan's view, in today's Warring States world, order has completely collapsed. In this kind of chaotic war in the world, if any country cannot become strong, it will be left with the only fate of perdition! The increase in grain production in the Song State only allowed the war potential of the Song State to continue to increase on the basis of materials. And war, after all, needs to be fought by people!

Therefore, Dai Yan needs to make the quality of the Song people continue to improve in a short period of time! And the way to quickly achieve this goal, Dai Yan has tried it in Taoqiu before, that is, to improve people's quality through education!

In the previous Song Civil War, the Taoqiu army was able to quickly defeat the Suiyang army, and compulsory education was absolutely indispensable! As a city with a majority of immigrants, the soldiers mobilized in a short period of time should be chaotic and difficult to cooperate. However, with the previous compulsory education, all soldiers were able to speak the same language, write the same words, and have a rough military knowledge. With these foundations, it is possible to ensure that the Taoqiu Army can form combat effectiveness in a short period of time!

How could Dai Yan not learn such an excellent experience?

When he took charge of the Song State and carried out the reform of the official system, in addition to the Ministry of Households, the Ministry of Rites, which was in charge of education and diplomacy, was the department he paid the most attention to!

The Song Kingdom had never had a department dedicated to education before, and at most there was only one similar institution called "Pan Palace". Such an institution also existed in the neighboring country of Lu, and it was the highest institution of learning in the country of Lu, somewhat similar to the Taixue of later generations. In the Song Kingdom, its role was more similar to that of an institution that managed sacrifices.

Therefore, such a department, especially the Department of Education, Dai Yan will not be handed over to the old aristocracy at all, but to the professors of Taoqiu University.

Such a group of people have been cultivated by the entire city in Taoqiu, and they already have an understanding of the education system of Taoqiu itself. At the same time, they also know how to use Taoqiu's powerful financial power to promote the development of education in the Song Kingdom!

In the past, when Dai Yan promoted education in Taoqiu, he raised funds by issuing bonds and built schools. And now that Dai Yan has mastered the entire Song Kingdom, under the condition that the central government's finances have not been greatly improved, issuing bonds is still the only option.

Fortunately, now that the Song Kingdom is unified, and Dai Yan's own credit is extremely good, education bonds, which have strong guarantees, can be sold in the market even if the yield is low. With money in hand, it's naturally easy to get things done!

The difficulty of promoting the education of a country is completely different from that of promoting the education of a city! In the large city of Taoqiu, because of the concentration of population, the construction of a few primary and secondary schools will allow the majority of Taoqiu teenagers to receive education. However, when this education is held in a country, except for Suiyang and Pengcheng, it is completely impossible to adopt the Taoqiu model!

After all, Suiyang and Pengcheng were the big cities of the Song Kingdom, and most of their populations lived in the city, which was relatively concentrated, and they could take a similar approach to Taoqiu, and after building a school in the city, it would be easy for most people to receive education. In other cities of the Song Kingdom, the people living in the cities were a minority after all, and most of the people lived in the vast countryside of the Song Kingdom.

If all the children of the Song Kingdom were to receive an education, even the simplest of all, in every village of the Song Kingdom, then the number of schools that would need to be built, and the costs associated with them, would be beyond the reach of the funds raised through the issuance of bonds!

After receiving such a report, considering the reality of Song Guo, Dai Yan also had to compromise, so he could only limit the number of schools. Regardless of the number of schools in Samdu, the number of schools located in other towns is roughly set at one middle school and three elementary schools in each city.

Because this education appropriation is issued by the central government, the cities except Sandu are all leveled by a bowl of water, which naturally causes contradictions between cities with different populations.

For example, some cities have a large population, such as Dayi Fanghe on the edge of Surabaya, which has a large population, only Sandu and Fengyi, etc., and only four schools are completely insufficient; As for Huangyi, which is more remote in the Song Kingdom, it itself is sparsely populated, so there may be a lot of such schools for it.

In addition to the East China Sea outside the Song Dynasty itself, the nobles of the East China Sea are also calling for the need for universal education. For them, it doesn't matter if they don't have an education, but their children can't be like the big ones. Moreover, there are some voices in the Song Kingdom itself, thinking that it is a "foreign land" like the East China Sea, and it is even more necessary for schools to educate the people well, so that they can better integrate into the Song Kingdom!

Such a simple educational reform set off monstrous waves in the Song Kingdom. In Dai Yan's view, the deeper reason behind this quarrel is actually related to the struggle for power!

As soon as the decree on compulsory education and the popularization of schools was introduced, the nobles of the entire Song Kingdom immediately felt a different kind of crisis. Years of experience in political struggles have made these people extremely sensitive. They knew very well that the aristocracy was able to rule the land by their bloodline. Not! The reason why they were able to establish stable rule was ultimately due to their monopoly on knowledge!

Maybe the average Song people don't care about the outside world, and the things they can remember won't be very long, but the nobles are different! Even if the nobles of the Song Kingdom are dull to the outside world, they are still very clear about the major affairs between the nations!

How did Sanhuan, who had been in power in Lu for several generations, lose his dominance in Lu State? Of course, there is a reason why Sanhuan's own political level is too inferior and is hollowed out by his subordinates, but the most fundamental reason is that Confucius, Shao Zhengmao, etc. have vigorously promoted private learning in the Lu State, and spread the knowledge that originally belonged to the aristocracy, so that those originally declining scholars and even the common people rose, and finally controlled the Lu State!

And now the monarch wants to spread knowledge through universal compulsory education in a more rapid way of private promotion of knowledge such as Confucius and Shao Zhengmao, which must be a devastating blow to the future of the aristocracy!

Therefore, even if there is not a trace of the school construction plan of the Ministry of Rites, the nobles will definitely oppose this policy! And now that the monarch has the support of a strong political force, the best way for the nobles to deal with it is not to oppose it directly, but to find loopholes in various ways to abort the national education plan!

It's a pity that these aristocrats are lagging behind the times after all, and they can't really understand how important compulsory education is in Dai Yan's mind! He hoped that in this way, he could improve the quality of the entire Song people!

Dai Yan can also vaguely feel the resistance of the nobles to compulsory education, and now, the nobles are still criticizing this plan by finding faults, which also makes Dai Yan feel gratified. After all, this is still within the rules to oppose, not a direct violation of the rules!

As a result, Dai Yan adopted other ways to revise the education plan. In his opinion, since the aristocracy wanted to oppose it, it was better to promote education in a more rapid way!

He soon reformed compulsory education, and the only change was to allow private individuals to run schools in rural areas that were not now under the influence of the Song Ministry of Rites!

The education of Taoqiu before, and even the education of the whole country of the Song Kingdom now, all of which are led by the government! However, Dai Yan's behavior of raising funds to run schools by issuing bonds many times makes it easy to feel that education is a business that keeps losing money!

Actually, this is not true. Aside from the educational outlook he wanted to instill in his people, and even the improvement of the quality of the people, education is still a business with a deep foundation!

When the Ministry of Rites began to implement the imperial examination system, and the Song people saw that the people who were as poor as them before had now become the official masters they needed to look up to, their hearts were strongly touched! In particular, these bureaucrats govern them on the land of the entire Song State, and their every move must be supervised by the bureaucracy!

Those who were originally poor people in Taoqiu, but they have only been studying for a few years, how are they different from us? If they can become officials, then so can we! This is the thought of countless poor people scattered all over the countryside of the Song Kingdom.

What people fear most is not exploitation, but the complete loss of their way forward! People all over the countryside of the Song Kingdom need education to make progress, and when the Ministry of Rites of the Song Kingdom cannot provide this opportunity, the merchants of Taoqiu can do it with the resources in their hands!

They themselves are not short of money, and after several years of compulsory education in Taoqiu, there is no shortage of literate teachers, the only thing they lack is policy! Now that the government allows them to run private schools, it is also a profitable thing to run in the countryside, so why not do it?

As a result, in addition to the public schools promoted by the Ministry of Rites, various private schools established by private individuals grew like weeds in the countryside of the entire Song Kingdom! Although these private schools have high fees, they are almost an extremely heavy expense for the poor people in the countryside, but the poor people of the Song Kingdom gritted their teeth and accepted it!

For them, they may not be able to learn the knowledge in books on their own, but it doesn't matter, as long as their sons and grandsons can learn knowledge and can go through this path, it is the best comfort for them!

For these private schools, Dai Yan only passed the unified books and unified exams, so that the entire education industry was in order, and there would be no surprises!

Of course, after the establishment of private school, the nobles found that this way was more beneficial to them! Because they can clearly perceive that the teachers of public schools are far above those of private schools in the countryside!

In this way, although the children of the nobles and the children of the poor have the same starting line, the nobles have abundant resources after all, and their children can also receive a better education, and the chances of becoming talented in the future are naturally higher than those of the children of the poor!

This situation became more obvious after Dai Yan built two universities in Suiyang and Pengcheng respectively! In this way, the graduates of the two Suiyang University and Pengcheng University, as well as the original Taoqiu University, can have a better chance - to become high-level civilian officials and even real generals in the army! Although there was no clear law to enforce this policy in the Song State, in the later bureaucratic and military system of the Song State, it became an "unspoken rule" that only a university graduate could be in a high position!

Among these three universities, except for the Taoqiu University that was established at the beginning, the enrollment does not set up a region and is admitted only on the basis of its talents, and the other two universities, Dai Yan has deliberately added restrictions on tuition fees and admission scores!

In this way, these two schools, whose admission conditions were more favorable to the Song nobles and even the wealthy class, seemed to give the Song nobles a shortcut - a shortcut to be able to continue to maintain their status!

They finally have no problem with the whole education system!

And for Dai Yan, who has achieved such a situation, he sneered! In such an overt and covert way, he certainly gave a lot of help to the nobles of the Song Kingdom, so that their children had an advantage in education, but he was not removing the impurities in the nobles?

Among the children of the aristocracy, there are certainly those who pay attention to "aristocratic demeanor", but there are still many people with poor quality! In this way, he was still able to restrict a large number of nobles who were not qualified enough to ascend to the throne, and at the same time, although it was extremely difficult for the children of the poor to ascend to the throne, with his huge population advantage, someone would inevitably be able to stand out in the end!

And these children of the poor who stood out, and the children of the nobility with strong resources and backgrounds, thus became the new elite class of the Song Kingdom! Although there is an aristocratic class among the elite, it is still very different from the aristocracy after all!

Such an elite class is a class that has abandoned the atmosphere of decay and can be outstanding! As long as the elite class of the Song Kingdom is always capable, Dai Yan is not worried about the crisis of the Song Kingdom!