* District 3 has an intense set of exams that rank children, determine their educational opportunities, and eventually, career. I think D3 tries to manufacture genius as well as technology. Like D1, I think D3 is expected to not just manufacture what's requested, but to continue to innovate and develop new technologies to please the Capitol. To this end, it’s important for D3 to try to identify, cultivate, and expand the population at the top of the intelligence bell curve. Students should be motivated to do their best and seek as much education as possible based on the relative desirability of a career in research/engineering, but even so, D3 has limited resources and needs a way to figure out which of the students to put its greatest effort into developing. I can see D3 distributing benefits such as tutoring, technological aides, and higher education (which the Capitol would never ‘waste’ on factory laborers) on the basis of periodic examination of students. So, in my head, from a young age, D3 education uses ‘ability tracking’ system, teacher evaluations and examinations to sort students into a hierarchy of groups, which I have not-so-creatively named alpha, beta, gamma, delta and epsilon (belatedly, I realized this has certain parallels to Brave New World; I prefer to call these parallels an ‘homage’ rather than ‘rip-off’). This system can be a positive for the highly intelligent child of factory workers who might not have had the resources to succeed without a system in place to identify the child as gifted and to direct resources to him/her, but for most of the population, it’s limiting. There are few positions available in the top tier; fail to make a high enough group and you won’t even be considered for a non-factory job. The extreme high-stakes nature of this testing means D3 has a cramming culture that rivals Japan or China.
* District 3 is the anti-career district; they purposefully shield their most capable children from reaping. If D3 has a relatively large population and is directing additional resources toward developing the most gifted (to keep pace with the expectations of the Capitol), on cold calculation, it makes sense to attempt to prevent the most intellectually capable children from being reaped. There’s only a few extremely bright children in any given age group, and, while intelligence counts for something, their odds in the arena are still long: unlike D4 or D7, the main industry of D3 doesn’t provide children with quasi-fighting skills (or even a particular level of physical fitness), and given the urban nature of the district, provides no easy way to train them for the type of survival skills that could help them make it in the nature-based arenas (which I think comprise the vast majority of the arenas we’ve seen or the characters have described). In my head, D3 provides a ‘supplemental nutrition program’ to all alpha-ranked children. Ostensibly the program promotes intellectual development by ensuring the children have adequate nutrition, but it’s a thinly veiled effort to ensure the brightest children never sign up for tesserae. Although it serves the purposes of the Capitol for D3 to protect and develop the brightest children, D3 strongly suspects the Capitol has rigged drawings to punish the district after labor incidents or other failures, and to remind the intellectual elite that the privileges they enjoy at the top of D3’s hierarchy are gifts from the Capitol that can be removed at any time.
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timeasmymeasure
District Three Headcanon, Part the Second
Date: 2013-07-25 03:14 am (UTC)* District 3 is the anti-career district; they purposefully shield their most capable children from reaping. If D3 has a relatively large population and is directing additional resources toward developing the most gifted (to keep pace with the expectations of the Capitol), on cold calculation, it makes sense to attempt to prevent the most intellectually capable children from being reaped. There’s only a few extremely bright children in any given age group, and, while intelligence counts for something, their odds in the arena are still long: unlike D4 or D7, the main industry of D3 doesn’t provide children with quasi-fighting skills (or even a particular level of physical fitness), and given the urban nature of the district, provides no easy way to train them for the type of survival skills that could help them make it in the nature-based arenas (which I think comprise the vast majority of the arenas we’ve seen or the characters have described). In my head, D3 provides a ‘supplemental nutrition program’ to all alpha-ranked children. Ostensibly the program promotes intellectual development by ensuring the children have adequate nutrition, but it’s a thinly veiled effort to ensure the brightest children never sign up for tesserae. Although it serves the purposes of the Capitol for D3 to protect and develop the brightest children, D3 strongly suspects the Capitol has rigged drawings to punish the district after labor incidents or other failures, and to remind the intellectual elite that the privileges they enjoy at the top of D3’s hierarchy are gifts from the Capitol that can be removed at any time.