forum HELP! Can I create a government built around education?

Started March 07, 2021 by @chat_noir group

tune

My apologies if this is in the right place or if someone's already talked about this, I didn't see anything on it.
I think I have to explain some stuff about my world quickly:
So there's this angel-ish race (humanish with wings but also meow machine'>purr machine ears and fur cos it's cold) living in/on the clouds. They aren't magic, as such, but they have these things called Wishes that they "forge" which are the most powerful magic thingies in, like, ever. They are used to change the shape of high-res hallucination, whether that's putting a castle on a hill where there was no castle or making the clouds solid etc. I'll add the link to my page on it if you want to read a bit more in depth.
The point is, you have to be really super smart and knowledgeable to be able to use these things. If you're a Wish mage (the people who or break, or cast, the Wishes) who specializes in buildings, say, you have to know a lot about buildings and how they're put together and stuff so you don't end up with a house that has windows instead of wobbly flip-shutters or leaks or has no roof.
So the smart people are technically the most powerful, because they can effectively use Wishes. The big dream in the culture is to become the next big Wish mage and like create these amazing things and stuff. So my question is, can I or how can I create a society/government where the education system is the most powerful entity? Where the principal of the Academy is the head of state, essentially?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance!
Here's the link if you wanna read more about my concept of Wishes;

Inspired by a local guild of scholars where I live that became an independent commune in protest of a dictatorship a few decades ago… The magic school setting that I've been building is basically set on becoming something similar.

The campus is huge, it's fortified as a castle, it's a boarding school too and so the people pacing the race it technically are in charge of people…so it's technically its own system, and as an institute of learning it is based on knowledge. They have to concern themselves with the living arrangements of students and faculty (of course), and staff; supply the dining halls and cafeterias with mandatory sustenance (like cheetos) and people behind the scenes who cook it and portion it; keep the plumbing and garbage disposal pacing the race smoothly; in addition to standard knowledge and innovations that their institute is there for first. They have their own on-campus currency in which the wages are earned by academic performance and conduct.

It's still only a small foothold on the power jostle of the City-State that it's in—Production and Services Guilds outside the school have their interests, the Monarchs and monarchists have their interests, the Military powers have their interests…and that's kind of the point of my story, so I'm not going to make it all about an absurdly powerful school (that's like the Absurdly Powerful Student Council trope), but as a concept I figure that it'll work well if it were made a bigger and more central thing.

And there was also a historical example: Alexandria before the burning of the wisdom warehouse—mostly the policy was that any incoming traders who carried grimoires would have those grimoires confiscated so that the grimoires could be duplicated. I would think that they sometimes returned the originals to the owners. But I think that's one way (doesn't have to be the only way) to show that it's a bigger deal in society than one building where people send all their kids to get in the doldrums for a whole workday.

Wow thank you Elly! I'm still trying to sort out the actual pacing the race of the school/govt but you've given me a few brain b^ubbles I can run with. Thank you :)