"Required to function" is a bit of an overstatement. Several of the big names in philosophy (source: A&A Appendix 1) write books of a quality between 8 and 9 (and only Cicero and Aristotle unambiguously had Good Teacher, writing with a Quality of at least 12).
As for Universities, I think that the process is more likely to get SQ15 than the individual teacher, considering that the minimum required Teach for a Magister is 5 (and it probably won't be higher; age limits). Say an average of +1 Communication (an "average professional" has a 6 in their skill and a +2 in any stat is fairly exceptional), and a fresh Magister is going to be teaching a classroom at SQ9; in reality it might be a bit higher, but since the required roll for passing your exam is a 12 (with a minimum +2 from Reputation), which can be fairly easily passed with a +8 bonus, there's clearly no expectation of a Great Teacher. So there's clearly something going on in universities that allows a class to average SQ15 per season.
Where does it specify that a Magister must have a Teaching score of 5? I'm not seeing that, the virtue does specify Artes Liberales and Latin have to be 5. And I know the roll to acquire a teaching position is high, but Latin and/or Artes Liberales can easily be substituted for the ability for acquiring a Magister in Artibus position.
...It doesn't, my bad. Which, if anything, makes the problem worse. There is no requirement to know how to teach before becoming a magister. And a Cathedral School Master only needs a minimum of 3.
I'd still expect a minimum char+skill of 6 from anyone who's teaching ordinary classes. Anyone else either has some kind of scratch on the chancellor (in a northern university) or is getting bounced out quick (in a southern one).
Well, it's a bit worse than that. As you say, getting a SQ 15 in teaching is not trivial. Even if every single Magister in Artibus in Mythic Europe is a Good Teacher, they have to have Com+Teaching total of 7. Now, I should say I've made a presumption that going to school is equivalent to two seasons of "work." One could argue that it is 3 seasons which means you need to get to a SQ of only 10, and it changes things around a bit, but even then assuming a Good Teacher, you need Com+Teacher of 5. So, regardless of how many seasons you presume the experience is granted, the SQs all but require a that the characters have Good Teacher, or be so old, or spend so many of their MiA experience points on teaching that what they can teach is limited to Artes Liberales and Latin...
Okay, now I'm going to stop you for a second. An MiA does teach AL and Latin, and his ordinary classes were in those two Abilities. That's his job. So it's reasonable to assume (if we expect a teaching magister to have C+T 6) that the magister spent 75 XP on Latin, 75 XP on AL, and 75 XP (through the academic learning rules) on Teaching, having 15 XP left over. A Doctor can spend (300 XP) 75, 75, 75, and 75 on Latin, AL, Teaching, and the Faculty skill.
Now, it's not 3 seasons of teaching, it's 2. If it were 3 seasons, then there's no way you're getting 30 XP "on top" of your XP by wealth. Admittedly, that's excessive regardless, since no other "apprenticeship" garners you more than 30XP for the entire year. So if I were to say that you're supposed to get 30 XP a year total, instead of 45 (which doesn't actually make any sense), here's how I'd break it down.
SQ averages 10, including +1 for classrooms. That's 2 seasons a year.
The third "season" is normally taken up by extraordinary classes, taught by baccalaureates who have very little idea how to teach yet and are more likely to be teaching in the back room of a brothel than the official classrooms. Say an average Comm+Teaching of 3, or SQ 6 per season.
You're free in the summer. Go practice. 4 XP.
(The fact that you get your regular XP on top of this is a gift from the game mechanics, not something that I'd actually say makes sense. Since these are Major Virtues, it's okay to say that the PC put in a lot of extra hours, had good teachers and magical help, had a private tutor for one season every year, et cetera, but it's not something I'd actually try to justify by mechanics.)
Right! What does an MiA teach, if we put all of his points inAL, Latin, and Teaching? What else does he know that he can teach? The higher that we make the Teaching ability the less the MiA knows that he can reasonably teach. No matter how you slice it the SQ necessary doesn't make sense.
Not all virtues which provide xp grant it above and beyond what the virtue provides. It isn't so much an issue of game mechanics as much as it is virtue mechanics.
I'm not interested or motivated to balance the virtue with othe virtues, although you can. No, I'm interested in making the virtue consistent and make sense with what is presented in Mythic Europe and Art & Academe.
Huh? An MiA is not supposed to have to teach anything beyond Latin and Artes Liberales. A Doctor is not supposed to have to teach anything beyond his faculty (which requires a knowledge of Latin and Artes Liberales to even get to). Anything else is "extraordinary" and learned on your own time.
Well, if you want to do that, I'd rule that you get 30XP a year as a university student, period. Again, no other program of studies in Europe comes even close to the benefits given by the RAW to a university student.
Assuming that most magisters are supermen is a bit inconsistent.
So, I guess what you are saying is that an MiA should have AL 5, Latin 5 and Teaching 5, and that you would house rule university (and I would guess this applies to the MiA) adds 30 xp per year, as opposed to 45 xp per year under RAW. I can see this as an attempt to balance the character, but let's face it, how much do Latin and Artes Liberales for non magi impact the overall game. I think the idea here was to still create some interesting and viable characters that could do something besides being an academic. Or at least augment their academic knowledge with various Area Lore.
Some of these works are passed on because of their scope (i.e. high level summae) or original material - but being remembered by history for being brilliant isn't the same as being academically successful. Some of the greatest teachers in history probably aren't well remembered because they didn't innovate (high Com, normal Int) or publish important works (high level Summae = low Ability scores), but that doesn't mean they weren't successful teachers.
To put it in hermetic terms, the guys who manage Breakthroughs get remembered by history. But everybody reads the books of the guys with high Com + Good Teacher.
While Good Teacher isn't 100% necessary (high Com and Puissant Teaching could substitute), you can bet that most university faculty have this virtue. I'd also bet that these people have Com of +2 or better. These are the most prestigious jobs available to academics, so only the best teachers are likely to land jobs.
I'm sorry, that isn't at all reasonable. I know of several different professions where people who aren't the best land jobs. And my position is that the setting requires that the average teacher at a University can generate a SQ of 15. Not even the best. When the average is a SQ of 15, what does the best teacher look like?
Where does someone who can only generate a SQ of 12 go? Does he teach in conjunction with someone who teaches at SQ 18, with the better teacher lamenting the inferior skills of the poorer teacher? And since middle ages teaching was simply a teacher reciting from a book, and not really discussing it, but having students memorize, why does the quality of the book not matter in the process at all?
In theory, the 'best' teacher has +5 Communication, Good Teacher, Puissant Teaching and his Teaching skill at his age limit (we'll call that a 10). With his specialization, that's (5+5+2+11+3) SQ26. Conceivably having an actual functional classroom/lecture hall rather than ad hoc converted rooms could add a point or two (in the way Covenants allows laboratories to). A starting Grog-level Magister in Artibus would max out at +3 Communication and Teaching 5, making his SQ (3+6+3) 12, which is far below the expected 15. If we assume that that's sufficient for professional teaching at a university - and in fact, MiA sets no lower limit on teaching skill, so SQ could be much, much lower - then obviously something else is going on.
In theory, parish schools and private tutoring.
This is one possibility, yes. Unfortunately, this would mean that some students who get a string of bad teachers will fail their examinations, and the university's reputation suffers. But why have teachers at all when students could just read any number of books to gain 12xp a season? Obviously they have to learn to read Latin first, but as I understand it this sort of thing happens at the Parish schools/tutors first and then the student, able to read, moves on to university life (otherwise they would not be able to follow lectures, being unable to read or understand their teacher).
Bottom line, university teaching has to be superior to just reading books (for the most part), or people would not bother and just read the books themselves. Reading a modern textbook is not as good as having someone explain the concepts to you person to person.
You raise a good point, in that the book's quality is irrelevant (when it should not be), but I doubt there is little discussion, or at least little commentary, by the teacher. See A&A pg97, where the student has to bring a copy of the text for his own use, as well as quills and ink to take notes. If the teacher isn't commentating the text, why would the students need to take notes? What doesn't happen is the student's don't ask questions, which lets the teacher go on uninterrupted.
There's more going on in university teaching, though, such as the extra-ordinary lectures, students copying texts themselves, disputations etc. It's very different from the regular 'study this text for a season' the regular rules have happen. This might have the effect of just boiling it down to an abstracted 30xp for 2 'work seasons' and the teacher's SQ is thrown to the wind. This would allow the newly minted Magister in Artibus to have an academic career without stinking terribly; the institutional educational system boils it all down to a decent 'average' experience.
The BAD thing about this abstraction is that actual, good teachers aren't of benefit to their students, but this is the same abstraction that happens with the apprenticeship of hermetic magi. I would have preferred that A&A gave students 4 seasons of learning a year (since classes are indeed year round), which would mean the normal 15xp + 30/year for being in academic study would be split across 4 seasons (11 and change per season). Then the teachers need only be SQ11-12, which makes far more sense.
Well, when you breakdown the abstraction of a Hermetic apprenticeship you find that a magus needs to generate a SQ of 13, 6 of which is from single student and 3 of which is the standard, meaning Teacher+Com has to be four. It's a much more reasonable number, it's what I'd expect anyone who is just starting out teaching to have, Teacher+Com of 4 or 5.
The breakdown of the abstraction of the Magister in Artibus and Baccalaureas virtues isn't reasonable when you break it down.
And where did you find that medieval university attendance was year round?
Well, as I said, it is somewhat unreasonable to assume that a Magister in Artibus is worse at teaching than a journeyman is at his craft. Thus, my assumption on the lesson pattern.
Legends write Tractatus at {SQ12 for Aristotle, SQ13 for Hildegarde/Abelard, SQ14 for Cicero}. We have 2 Good Teacher with +4 Communication for that exceptional 11th century. Those 2 were prolly {Com 4 + 3 + GT 5 + Teaching 5 = SQ17} and just dropping Good Teacher makes them SQ12. I'd put senior Doctor in (Faculty) that 12-15 range, which explain why Abelard with his zero Teaching SQ12 was so famous.
But is his craft teaching or a subject matter expert who can impart knowledge? Someone who crafts has to have one ability, but the MiA has to have 3...
Agreed. The sidebar on pg 96 states that academic learning is another exception to the rules about breaking up XP for a season, allowing 1/2 to be spent on the academic ability being taught and the other 1/2 can go to Latin or Teaching. It would make sense that a MiA would rack up at least a Teaching of 3 (let's not forget he did 2 years of compulsory teaching), and if he was serious about becoming a teacher, he'd have a 5. Given how A&A presents it I'm surprised the MiA virtue wasn't amended to require this.
The last paragraph of pg 97 in A&A:
"A student character spends two seasons a years studying and has two "free" seasons, like any other Ars Magica character. This abstraction is to keep academic characters in line ith other Ars Magica characters. Historically universities taught classes for most of the year, with sizeable breaks for religious holidays and a larger break during summer."
So at worst students are in classes for a solid 3 seasons or so, though I doubt there's more than a couple weeks off a season, even in the summer (at worst, the summer might be 2/3 source quality). The abstraction of 2 seasons at SQ15 isn't really tenable (almost no-one within reason can offer that kind of SQ to a classroom of students), so treating university life as full-time study is far more reasonable.
Well, it does say sizable breaks for religious holidays, what does sizable mean? And how many of the religious holidays had breaks for university students? Weren't there many more religious holidays celebrated during the middle ages than today? And it says a large break during the summer. It's not too tough to eek out 3 seasons of instruction from that schedule. I can imagine a month off over Christmas, at the traditional break between semesters, which I think stretches back to the middle ages.
So, if we settle on 3 seasons we have a character being taught 30 xp in 3 seasons meaning a SQ of 10, which is much more achievable, but we have a problem with the 15 xp being earned in the free season, because he still gets his yearly 15 xp. I'll ignore the 15 xp problem. So with a SQ of 10, you now have a Com+Teacher+Virtues total of 7, which is much more reasonable, and it's going to allow for a more varied faculty, some will be good teachers, some will be Puissant teachers, some will have an affinity and have skill beyond their years. I like that. that's much more like the Ars that I know; there are multiple ways to get to the goal. When the Com+Teacher+Virtues >=12, you have many fewer ways of getting to such a high total.
