#shinoureijutsuin curriculum development!

[bleachbleachbleach]

Hi! I was hoping to run some maths on the ins and outs of the academy, do you have any screenshots of classrooms or the like? I really want to figure out the graduation class sizes, specifically, but I also just love the weirdness that surrounds the academy in general, so any trivia is appreciated!

First of all, THANK YOU for this ask. This is the kind of nonsense we want to dedicate every waking moment of our lives to.

When you have them, I would love to hear your speculations re: class sizes and how many classes and what the size of an Academy graduating class is! I was talking with my co-blogger about this, and given that the Gotei itself is not that large, we figured each graduating class can't be THAT big, relative to the Gotei itself, or else the size of each division would increase very quickly, given that it's not as though shinigami are aging out of service at the same rate. I mean, I'm sure a lot of them die every year even without a Blood War, but if, say, the equivalent of an entire Division is dying annually across the Gotei, that is... alarming...

Let's begin with some potentially useful group shots (left to right):

a mixed-class lecture (~200-300?). They're doing problem sets on the board, so it's not an exam, but both Renji and Rukia are in this hall, and it seems like it's before the classes have been split up. Maybe it's Introduction to Shinigami Studies or something?

the people who showed up to ogle Aizen (I didn't count these). It looks like a sparse crowd but it's over 100 people, possibly well over.

the Trauma FieldTrip (66, not including Hisagi et al), which potentially offers us a hard number on at least how many people are in Class 1.

[Bleach e32/46]

Of course, class instruction seems to be split into a smaller teacher/student ratio, into what appear to be classes of 20-30. The practical kidou classes seem smaller than the practical zanjutsu classes, which in turn seem smaller than the lecture/theory classes.

This is all just for Class 1, though, which for all we know might be a different size than the other class(es), since you have to test into it. I wish we'd seen Rukia's class! Hitsugaya's zanjutsu class looks like it's basically the same size as RenjiKiraHinamori's, but I assume he was also Class 1.

[Bleach e46/DDR]

There's some shots that are mostly about architecture rather than population, but many could also give us a sense of the volume of students on campus, based on who many are in the halls, the quad, the study rooms, etc.:

[Bleach e46/DDR]

And to close, these are just pure architecture shots, because where else are we going to put them, lol, but the Academy is a pretty big-looking building. I mean, look at all those windows! And there's at least one other, separate building, which is where RenjiKiraHinamori's zanjutsu lesson was held. (Not that this matters, but Hitsugaya's is held in what appears to be a different building, re: the windows, so maybe we can say there's at least two different classroom buildings, separate from the main gold building.) The pretty green courtyard is also not the front courtyard immediately upon entering the Academy gates, because that one is just an open square.

[Bleach e46]

#bleach architecture #bleach meta #bleach anime #shinoureijutsuin curriculum development! #shinoureijutsuin #shinigamiology #asks #no brain just bleach

[bleachbleachbleach]

Damnit you just triggered my writers brain. The way I see it is that part of why the Shino Academy takes so long isn't just training the potential shinigami, but also covering things such as literacy. (Aizen had taught a Calligraphy class there before being made Shinji's lieutenant)

Part of that I think would be speach training and language. Think about how in the British army their officers were/are trained to carry themselves like a gentleman, including the king's English. Put simply, they are speeking in a generally agreed upon subset of language so that everyone can understand eachother. There are other languages used in rukon, as well as dialects, and shinigami use their natural language in like company. (It being tokyo Japanese is probably solely for the convenience of the one consuming the media)

[This is in response to musing from this post!]

If we’ve said something that triggered your writerly instincts, when we have carried out our life’s mission! <333333333

As someone who’s spent way too long in school, part of me is like "6 years isn’t that long given that they’re starting from 0" even as I also know that most military training is not that long by any means. One day I’d LOVE to put together a bunch of potential course curricula for the Academy, because 1) I am obsessed with Aizen’s calligraphy class to an unhealthy degree, and 2) I do think they take The History of Soul Society and Hollow Biology 103, etc. though I suspect all of this is sorely lacking in the way that all curricula are—especially because every shinigami we’ve met knows a lot of things while simultaneously knowing absolutely zero things.

Below the cut, some of my thoughts on the Academy's auxiliary curriculum:

Entrance Exam

My co-blogger pointed out that the Academy has an entrance exam, and one that’s difficult enough to fail—though it makes me wonder what the nature of the exam is. Is it rote memorization of concepts? Is it testing your logical and spatial reasoning? What else are they screening for besides reiatsu? Regardless apparently it’s a written exam, which I imagine puts you at a pretty distinct disadvantage with you’re from most of Rukongai, because first you have to go find someone who will teach you how to read and write well enough to sit the exam, before you even get to go to shinigami school.

Calligraphy Class

My headcanon for Aizen’s calligraphy class (besides it being one of the many way he cruises for new recruits) is that it has both practical and artistic components. The artistic part is self-explanatory. The practical part is basically just penmanship training, which comes from the fact that all the handwritten reports we see seem to basically be in the same handwriting, even though we see in Colorful Bleach that if they’re not writing those reports with their inkbrushes, everyone’s handwriting is different. The two pieces of this class are DEEPLY divorced from one another, because one is deeply personal and the other the exact opposite of that. But when Aizen sent his course proposal to the Faculty Executive Committee, he probably said something about how practicing artful calligraphy imbues young potential shinigami with a mindset better suited to successful kidou and zanjutsu training and he's probably not wrong. Everything is utilitarian/practical in the end.

Report Writing 101

It would make sense that everyone take Report Writing 101, but part of me feels like that might be a more on-the-fly skill, or Continuing Education, because most of these guys aren’t writing reports anyway, and the number of reports written increases with rank, and since the Captain is going to have to sign off on everything anyway, they probably ether fix anything that’s amiss or give no fucks about whether anything is amiss before sending it on. So maybe that’s beyond the purview of the Academy. I mean, if most people don’t graduate with shikai, I guess they probably don’t graduate with Report Writing either. Maybe it's one of those "if you get fancy enough, there's one more thing you'll have to learn on your own!" deals.

Language Preserves Hierarchies Class

So that’s penmanship and written language, both things that Soul Society seems very invested in. What of the spoken language? The Gotei, for all their… whole thing, really, seem perhaps more permissive about a lot of things than a company might be IRL. Crazy hair, uniform customization, pretty informal language (though there is definitely still some preservation of language register based on rank). I could definitely see the Gotei wanting their trainees to have at least like, a 1-credit practicum in keigo, just because that helps preserve the power dynamics/hierarchies the Gotei runs on. I could also see them staring imperiously at potential new shinigami until this information was magically pressed into them, LOL.

Maybe my big interest here is "what does the Academy teach" vs. "what does the Academy just expect you to just know" (regardless of how much or how little sense these expectations might make). This is in regards to life skills as well as reiatsu skills. I'm convinced that there's a lot a lo a lot of room for improvement when it comes to this curriculum, 2000+ years in the making or not!

We basically said the same thing re: language variance in Rukongai, though oh MAN now I’m curious about like, to what degree standardization within Soul Society makes it out into Rukongai. Because on some level maybe it shouldn’t at all, because the Seireitei doesn’t seem to really care what’s going on in Rukongai except sometimes when whole swatches of souls go missing, but who’s doing all this teaching? To what end, besides Academy entrance exams? Is this a linear process where the resident Literate Soul needs to train the next one, or are there souls coming in from the Living World with different versions of this knowledge all the time? GAH I LOVE IT.

Unpaid Internship Class

I also wanna know, like, how much of Academy training is in situ vs. ex situ. Like, the Advanced Class leapt up to "field trip" really fast. Are the last year or two basically just Gotei Lite, except you don’t get paid (or get paid a lot less), even though you might die? Do you get TA credits if you’re like Hisagi et al, leading first-year field trips? Honestly I feel like a lot of Academy training is probably JUST learning how to interpret, control, and manipulate your reiatsu, and JUST trying to communicate with your sword and make it a true zanpakutou. Jinzen class is probably the hardest class series. If those two things happen to come easily to you, I imagine that’s mostly what fast-tracks you through the Academy curriculum.

But I’m coming at all this from a very contemporary, more-school-than-military, pretty Westernized perspective. Part of me wants to learn about how "school" has worked across the last 2000 years and part of me just wants to make it up in accordance with my own desires and interests because IT’S MAGIC GHOST MILITARY SCHOOL. 

Truly, I just want fandom’s 370 different versions of how this school works. There are so many great options. I want them all.

Anyone wanna do a "36 Views of Shinoureijutsuin" with me where we all make different potential curriculum plans lol. WHO WANTS TO DO FAKE ADMIN PAPERWORK WITH ME.

#shinoureijutsuin #shinoureijutsuin curriculum development! #bleach headcanons #shinigamiology #asks #no brain just bleach