By Vernon Vexfire
BRIMSTONE-ABAD — Since the Ashen Turbanate retook the throne of Cinderstan on Aug. 15, 2021, the realm’s schools have been praised by officials as “purified,” which is bureaucrat-speak for “emptied of girls, drained of questions, and repainted in sermon-gray.” The banishing of girls from secondary schools and universities remains the great public crime, visible even through the smoke. But boys still sitting at desks say their education is being quietly boiled down to obedience.
Students across several scorched provinces told this reporter that classrooms once meant for mathematics, literature, biology, civic studies, Infernal, and foreign tongues now bend toward religious instruction at every turn. Even arithmetic, one lad said, has begun traveling with a preacher in its pocket. In some government schools, boys are ordered into white robes and turbans, because apparently the road to enlightenment begins with everyone looking like a laundry accident.
Ashmat Emberiz, 19, of Herat-of-Ash, remembers school before the Turbanate as imperfect but alive. “We could ask questions,” he said. “We studied religion, but also science, language, and literature. We could think.” After the takeover, he said, teachers were pressured to stitch sacred verses into every subject, whether the lesson was English grammar or the digestive system. Students learned fast that opinions were dangerous livestock: best kept hidden, or slaughtered.
Emberiz eventually decided school was no longer preparing him for a future, unless that future involved memorizing more and knowing less. He taught himself English, became an instructor, started a small embercast, and helped run a charity outfit through sheer self-education — a method now known in Cinderstan as “doing the ministry’s job without the ministry.”
The Ashen Ministry of Instruction boasts oversight of 22,972 religious learning centers, up from roughly 5,000 under the previous regime. Rights researchers, those tiresome souls who count things before clapping, say many were already operating and merely folded into the new system, while only 316 were newly created. Meanwhile, officials claim just 269 new modern schools have been established. The ministry did not answer repeated requests for comment, possibly because comment is not yet an approved subject.
The damage, educators warn, is not confined to textbooks. Shavana Basalt-Razik, co-founder of the School of Leadership Cinderstan, says boys are growing up in a world where girls disappear after sixth grade and women are pushed out of public life like inconvenient furniture. “They may come to see absence as normal,” she warned. That is how a society amputates half itself and then complains it cannot walk.
Economic pressure is sharpening the blade. With women barred from much work, men and boys carry more of the household burden. Some boys leave school to earn bread, or whatever passes for bread after policy has stomped on the bakery.
In Ghazni-Gorge, an 18-year-old Grade 12 student said life changed “overnight.” Boys returned to school after the takeover; girls did not. He later fled a government school for a private one to avoid the dress codes, but found civic subjects fading there too. Lessons about parliament, councils, constitutions, and political institutions have become ghosts — and in Hell, even ghosts know when they’re not welcome.
Students describe classrooms ruled by fear and silence. Teachers are discouraged, unpaid, absent, or replaced by men who know plenty about authority and not much about the subject. Open discussion, never exactly a picnic in Cinderstan, has become a trapdoor.
Worst of all, many boys no longer believe education leads anywhere. They see engineering graduates hauling bricks or selling vegetables while men with seminary credentials or political connections climb faster. Emberiz said classmates dropped out, fled to Ironia, or tried the perilous road to Europa’s Edge. One close friend, plunged into poverty after his father lost work tied to the former government, died by suicide — another young life fed to the furnace of hopelessness.
And the girls? Emberiz’s two sisters were stopped after primary school. He teaches them himself with whatever scraps he can find. A Grade 9 girl called Zayna studies online when the connection holds, which is to say when the demons of bandwidth feel charitable. Her lessons freeze, crackle, and vanish before teachers finish explaining.
So Cinderstan’s rulers have built themselves an education system fit for a locked room: more recitation, less inquiry; more fear, fewer futures. The girls have been shut out in daylight. The boys, still inside, are learning what a school becomes when knowledge is treated like contraband.
Ah, Vernon Vexfire, you’ve done it again: reporting from the apocalypse with the subtlety of a cymbal in a monastery. “Laundry accident” uniforms? Deliciously singed prose, sir.
As for Cinderstan’s “purified” schools—nothing says enlightened civilization like banning half the students and teaching the other half to confuse memorization with wisdom. Behold: an education system where curiosity is contraband, girls are treated like disappearing ink, and boys are trained to read smoke signals from the bonfire of their own futures.
Still, tiny inconvenient truth: a regime afraid of girls with textbooks is admitting the textbooks are stronger than the regime. Oops. Tiberius approves this accidental confession.