In the Song Dynasty, there was no law or order.

The Song Dynasty in the 13th year of the Qingli period was full of positivity.

The economy, culture and technology developed comprehensively.

The education penetration rate was gradually raised, and three-year compulsory education officially began.

This proposal was made by Zhao Jun to Zhao Zhen at the regular meeting of Chongzheng Hall at the end of the 13th year of the Qingli period.

He hoped to start six years of compulsory education.

He believed that now was the best time to carry out compulsory primary education.

First of all, the domestic economy developed rapidly.

During the Jingyou period, the annual GDP was only 400 to 500 million guan, and the tax revenue was only 70 to 80 million guan.

And most of the tax revenue had to bear the heavy military expenses, making it difficult to develop education.

However, as the reform effect became more and more significant in recent years, the country's wealth and productivity increased several times, and the annual fiscal revenue reached more than 500 million guan.

Although the higher the fiscal revenue, the more money needs to be spent, such as the problem of repairing the city of Beiping a few years ago.

There are also the construction of railway networks in various places, investment in science and technology, and the construction of hydropower stations.

However, education is the cornerstone, and education cannot be neglected no matter how poor it is.

Therefore, even if money is spent on all aspects, once compulsory education is opened, fiscal expenditure will inevitably increase significantly, and this money must be spent.

Otherwise, if it is delayed for too long, education will only lag behind and slow down the country's development.

The second is the problem of educational progress.

Although the education system of primary, middle, high and university in the country has been perfected, the tuition fees are high, and only well-off families can afford to go to school.

The Song Dynasty is indeed rich now, but it does not mean that it is rich in all aspects, but that most people have solved the problem of food and clothing, and no longer worry about food like any previous dynasty.

But among the vast peasant class, since the price of grain is not high, simply farming can only ensure that they will not starve to death, and it is impossible to get rid of poverty and become rich.

Therefore, the lives of most of the lower-class people in the Song Dynasty are not very comfortable.

Every year, after solving the firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea, it is considered good to have a few strings of money left, and you have to buy some clothes and furniture. It is very difficult to support children to finish primary school, middle school, high school and university.

However, the current national situation of the Song Dynasty is one that urgently needs a large number of educational talents. Factories are being built everywhere, and workers also need cultural level.

At present, there are many illiterate factory workers in various places, and many people do not even have primary school education, lacking industrial research and development capabilities.

There are also scientific research technology and scientific theories that need to be continuously innovated.

There may be one or two people in the scientific community who can rapidly promote scientific development.

For example, Newton and Einstein.

But the condition for the emergence of Newton and Einstein is the popularization of education. It is not realistic to expect scientists to appear among hundreds of millions of people, but not to expect one out of ten people.

Therefore, when the education process has been slightly backward and private education cannot be widely popularized due to the high tuition fees, compulsory education must be carried out.

This is true for both Japan's compulsory education after the Meiji Restoration and my country's nine-year compulsory education that has been fully implemented since 1986.

Therefore, the implementation of compulsory education is an inevitable trend, in order to significantly improve the quality of the country's citizens.

However, everyone discussed it seriously for a long time at the meeting, and everyone believed that the six-year compulsory education system put too much pressure on the finances and should be considered again.

The main reason is that the population of the Song Dynasty is growing rapidly. It is foreseeable that tens of millions of school-age children will enter primary school in the next few years, and the financial burden will be very terrifying.

Once compulsory education is relaxed, it means that a large number of primary schools will be expanded. There may be tens of thousands of primary schools across the country, not just thousands.

Tens of thousands of primary schools have an average of hundreds of students each, and at least six teachers must be equipped. Some large primary schools may even need dozens or even hundreds of teachers.

Hundreds of thousands of teachers are needed across the country.

Let’s not talk about whether there are so many teachers in the normal education in the Song Dynasty. Even if there are, plus various school facilities and continuous maintenance funds, I am afraid that the annual fiscal budget will be tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of guan.

Basically, once compulsory education is implemented, one-fifth of the national finances will have to be invested in it, accounting for 20%. Even in various developed countries in later generations, it is only in the single digits, which is too exaggerated.

Therefore, it is still necessary to study carefully in this regard.

Zhao Jun felt that what everyone said was indeed reasonable. The 20% investment in education was indeed not appropriate. Even if education was to be vigorously developed, an annual investment of 10% would already exceed all developed countries in the world in the future.

The country still had a large number of places to be built. If education was raised too high at once, and the rest of the construction did not keep up, the result would only cause a large number of talents to be unemployed, which would waste manpower.

After realizing that he had gone too far, Zhao Jun discussed with everyone and finally determined three years of compulsory education and implemented the five-four-three system.

This system is a school system of five years of elementary school, four years of junior high school, and three years of high school.

Among them, compulsory education will be carried out from the first to third grades of elementary school, and tuition fees will be collected in the fourth and fifth grades to maintain the finances of local education.

In this way, although the investment in education will still be increased, both the number of people involved and the entire system will be much smaller, and literacy will be the main focus, supplemented by basic education.

In a few years, when the national strength reaches another level, we will begin to focus on basic education as the main target to improve the education level of the entire country, so as to achieve the purpose of cultivating more talents.

certainly.

Naturally, the entire meeting content cannot be decided and implemented so hastily.

The Constitutional Yuan proposed this direction, and the next step is to carry out pilot implementation first. For example, first carry out compulsory education in Bianliang to see the results. If there are no problems, then promote it nationwide, and make budgets and preparations.

It may take several years to actually implement it. Although it's a bit slow, the plate is too big, and there are many things that affect the whole body, so we have to be cautious.

This is also the strategic policy adopted by our country for any reform in later generations to avoid mistakes.

In addition to education, as the School of Physics has deepened its research on electromagnetics, electricity has also begun to be widely used in industry.

And the common people also need electricity, whether it is electric lights or electric fans, they can be commercialized.

Therefore, it is imperative to build a large number of power stations.

Including thermal power generation and hydropower generation, both need to repair projects and hire manpower. Just relying on the 30% of fiscal revenue retained by local governments is definitely not enough, and central fiscal allocations are also needed.

Plus the rest of the directions and various plans made before.

The result was that at the end of the thirteenth year, the taxes that had just been collected were almost all distributed without being kept warm.

This made many prime ministers, including Zhao Jun, very emotional.

The more money you have, the less you spend it.

In the past, the annual income hovered around 60-80 million yuan, which only needed to cover military expenses, official salaries and other miscellaneous expenses.

Now the annual income has reached 500 million guan, military expenditure has been greatly reduced, and although official salaries have not dropped significantly, they have increased to 20 million guan due to the increase in officials year by year.

But compared with today's fiscal revenue, both military expenditures and official salaries are only a drop in the bucket, and the total does not exceed 40 million yuan.

As a result, the remaining more than 400 million yuan has to be spent on infrastructure, scientific research investment, innovation subsidies, social security, medical expenditures, transportation, state-owned companies, naval fleets, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, etc.

Not only was all the fiscal revenue for the year lost, but even when all the nations came to North Korea at the end of last year, they sent a large number of gifts, and all the money earned from selling outdated firearms was not enough.

Let everyone sigh, national development and construction is indeed a big hole that cannot be filled.

Just when the Song Dynasty was worried that its annual income of 500 million yuan was too little.

At this moment, Wanyan Wugunai, who was far away in Liaodong, was sitting in the palace in Shangjing of the Liao Kingdom, looking happily at the mountains of gold, silver and jewels in front of him.

The Imperial Palace in Shangjing of the Liao Kingdom was the earliest palace in the Liao Kingdom. It was not actually large in scale, but it was the birthplace of the Khitan. A large number of Khitan nobles lived here and left behind a lot of wealth.

After Wugu Nai conquered Beijing, many Khitan nobles fled, and a large amount of wealth was plundered by the Jurchens, including various Song coins, some gold, silver and jewelry.

All in all, there may be dozens of carriages.

"Your Majesty, let me be clear. There are more than 1.8 million coins from the Song Dynasty, and the total value of all kinds of jewelry can be worth one to two million coins."

Tang Kuogute, who was named Guolun Bojilie, reported to Wanyan Wugunai.

"Hahahahahaha."

Wanyan Wugunai was very happy. He had never seen so much money in his life.

"Your Majesty, what should we do with these?"

Tang Kugute asked.

"Save it first and tell the whole army to reward them with the money if they conquer Zhongjing."

Wanyan Wugunai made a decision with a wave of his hand.

He knows it very well.

Now is not the time to slack off.

A few months ago, both he and the Liao Kingdom sent envoys to the Song Dynasty.

However, the attitude of the Song Dynasty was very ambiguous. It did not help the Liao Dynasty and had no intention of helping the Jin Dynasty.

It seems that the two are not helping each other, they are just playing Tai Chi and kicking a ball, but they are never sure.

This made Wanyan Wugunai a little worried, fearing that the Song Dynasty might have the intention of fighting with the snipe and the clam and benefiting the fisherman.

Therefore, he must fight quickly. Taking the Liao Kingdom and Linhuang Mansion in Beijing is not enough to seal the victory. He must continue to attack.

We need to capture Dading Prefecture in Zhongjing, completely wipe out the Liao people, and let the matter settle.

When the time comes, the Jin Kingdom will replace the Liao Kingdom, and they will immediately send envoys to pay tribute to the Song Dynasty. They will do their best to show off and become a vassal state of the Song Dynasty.

I don't think the Song Dynasty would risk the whole world's disapproval to attack its own vassal country just for the sake of the barren land in the north.

As for the money.

Although this was the most wealth Wanyan Wugunai had ever seen, he understood that only by letting the soldiers fight to the death could he quickly capture the Liao Kingdom.

Therefore, money must be spread so that the soldiers can fight to the death.

After making the decision to fight quickly, Ugunai only rested in Beijing for two days before leading his army non-stop southward.

When he first rebelled six years ago, he only had thousands of people from the Wanyan and Tang Kuo tribes combined.

But as it has continued to grow over the past six years, various ministries have joined in one after another, and the number of soldiers and horses has reached tens of thousands.

They also recruited surrenders and rebels along the way, not only gathering troops from Shiwei, Bohai, Xiren and other tribes, but also the surrendered Khitan troops.

It quickly snowballed, and by the time they reached the vicinity of Zhongjing, Wanyan Wugunai already had an army of more than 100,000 men.

This is also very similar to the later Jin Kingdom.

Or it could be said that this is the normal direction of war. For example, Cao Cao's army of hundreds of thousands at Chibi was also composed of surrendered troops from all directions.

Under the rapid offensive of the Jin Kingdom, the already corrupt system of the Liao Kingdom collapsed rapidly.

Although they had artillery, the army was seriously corrupt, lacked gunpowder and ammunition, and the dud rate of grenades was very high, which caused great losses in the battle.

In addition, the combat effectiveness of the Pishi Army, which had long been defeated by the Song Dynasty, was low, and it was far from being a wolf-like opponent of the Jin people. It soon lost a large number of cities and was chased by the Jurchens.

Yelu Chongyuan's troops became fewer and fewer, with only more than 30,000 people left to guard Zhongjing Dading Prefecture.

The Song Dynasty did not agree to their request for help.

The Liao emperor could only choose to concentrate his troops and horses to fight to the death in Dading Prefecture.

On December 29, the 13th year of the Qingli period of the Song Dynasty, after three days of siege of Dading Prefecture, the Jin people finally blasted open the city gate with artillery.

Groups of Jin troops rushed into the city. The Liao army fought with the Jin army in the streets. After a fierce battle for half a day, they were finally defeated. Yelu Chongyuan fled from the south gate with his family under the protection of the guards.

At the same time, a large number of remaining Liao troops also followed him out. About 20,000 people fled in a scattered manner, and several thousand people followed Yelu Chongyuan to flee southward.

On the 30th, the New Year arrived. The atmosphere inside and outside Yuzhou City, the border of the Song Dynasty, was festive, and every household was hung with lanterns.

Although it was the middle of winter and it snowed lightly in the north, it did not stop the enthusiasm of the people at all. They wore cotton clothes and set off firecrackers. Many of them ran from the surrounding villages to the city to go to the market.

Carts of New Year goods were pulled home, and people were full of laughter.

But at noon, many troops appeared on the bank of the Yu River in the distance. The soldiers of the border defense camp originally deployed in Yuzhou shouted and ran to the river.

They dug trenches and piled sandbags. I don’t know what they were doing.

Many curious people heard the news and walked out of the city and ran to the nearby river bank to watch from a distance, about a mile away from the river bank.

Just when they were confused, there was a sudden sound of horse hooves in the distance, and dust rose.

A large number of troops came to the Yu River.

"Listen, people in front, foreign troops are prohibited from entering the border of the Song Dynasty. Violators will be killed without mercy!"

The Song army brought out a set of loudspeakers and the leading commander shouted.

The army in the distance slowly slowed down, but before they came to negotiate, the sound of killing gradually rose in the back.

Then another army rushed out, and the two sides were forced to fight fiercely.

The people of Yuzhou on the south bank were already dumbfounded.

It turned out that there was a war in the north.

What moved all the people of the Song Dynasty even more was that.

When the north was fighting to the death.

In the territory of the Song Dynasty in the south, there was a scene of singing and dancing, enjoying the joy of the New Year.