IST Academy

[robkelk]

I've spent over 30 minutes trying to get this posted. Yuku is having serious connection issues today.
There are only two cultural familiarities native to IST Earth: Eastern and Western. That’s an artifact of a powerful U.N. Check pg 23, and the history of IST. The world isn't that culturally diverse (not in a bad way, read the section). The Muslim world just isn't that powerful, and would probably fall into the Eastern familiarity. I would go so far as to say we could probably define them as “U.N. Member” and “Non-U.N. Member.”

That's far too much of an oversimplification, IMHO. Our world is not that homogeneous (no matter how hard Hollywood has tried to make it so), and the IST world only diverged from ours seven decades ago.

It’s more likely that Odessa became the Capital of the Ukraine as opposed to Kiev, as there was an IST Embassy located there, and not in Kiev, to drive tourism and city growth. Otherwise, unless the U.N. felt like yanking the Embassy out of Odessa and relocating it, the Ukraine doesn’t qualify for two embassies.

Which they might have - it isn't up to the UN where a country decides to put its capital.

And, again, 5 campuses is a dispersed target that can be attacked easily, and would be difficult to defend. Which schools are for young children, which are for teens and which are for adults?

I was thinking they all were. They're Academies, not public schools, after all.

Sticking with three is significantly more focused and easier to have curriculum pertinent to the students. Not to mention drastically easier to defend.
Also, while Bob hasn’t said, I think a student body of between one and two thousand is what to expect, and five campuses would be too many. Unless we want to consider keeping the “manufactured metahuman” practice around and make it safer, so, in 2015, people can pay to have the procedure done on them to become metahumans. But, personally, I don’t like that idea much.

I thought we had agreed that not all of the students were metahumans ...?

And a very, very important fact is that not everyone is good at learning languages. Sure, my buddy Xaiax learned a 3 year Japanese course in six months and a 2 year Chinese course in three months, and my friend Sol's father taught himself both Arabic and Vietnamese (simultaneously) in three months (did I mention that he's also 85!), and both had them at a conversational level by that time (Xaiax, went to Japan for two years to teach English shortly after that class). While, I, have tried to study both Spanish and Russian for years I simply can't grasp them. When I stopped programming, those languages leaked out my ears faster that I would have ever thought. If I didn’t use English every day, I’m sure I’d be at the grunt and point level within hours (waking up is hard on me). Not everyone will be able to learn foreign languages, and since these schools aren't just for IST members . . . the mandatory languages aren't that useful, in fact, they will actively discriminate against people who have a hard time learning languages.

Which is exactly why courses in English are available at the Kyiv campus.

Also, keep in mind the two, official, languages of the U.N. and IST are English and French. Those would be the primary languages at any IST Academy. And, I could see them having "Frenglish" as a student-created language.

Speaking as someone who lives in Ottawa (where both languages are used in all aspects of life), I can't see that.

I could see that an IST Academy Graduate (starting as a teen or earlier) would have both English and French as languages, in addition to their native and destination language, but beyond that, it’s really a wasted effort.

Metahuman students are also taught how to use their abilities - and how (and when) to not use their abilities.

As for the last part of that, in my Super San Diego game, set at the school for metahumans, the school headmaster (Ezekiel), mandates an ethics class for every metahuman student, every year. He teaches the senior year students.
As for the first part, I constantly envision Arthur, from the first episode of The Tick cartoon:
“No. No. No. Changed my mind. Want to come down.”
I like characters who don’t fit their powers. I have several of them. Most of them, eventually, grow into them. It also assumes that someone there can understand and help them with their powers. Hence, Pink was never sent to the Academy. A constant ethics class, taught by Argurous, was the best they could do for her.

There's more to Creativity, Action, Service than just ethics, though.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012