Education in the Golden Sea is uneven. Churches, households, navies, companies, private tutors, and apprenticeships all teach different kinds of knowledge and different ideas about obedience.
Common education
Basic reading and arithmetic are most available in ports, church schools, military settlements, and merchant households. In rural areas, education may depend on a local priest, household teacher, traveling clerk, or mutual-aid circle.
Apprenticeship
Pilots, engineers, surgeons, signal clerks, printers, shipwrights, and navigators are usually trained through long apprenticeships. The apprentice learns not only technique but the professional memory of accidents, failures, tricks, and names.
Naval and company schools
Naval academies teach mathematics, navigation, gunnery, command, and institutional loyalty. Company schools emphasize accounts, contracts, extraction, and logistics. Both produce capable people and narrow assumptions.
Language of authority
Law, theology, commerce, and engineering may use different languages even within the same port. A person who speaks fluently may still be unable to read the form that controls their wages.
Censorship
Governments censor military information, companies suppress accident records, and churches challenge texts they consider dangerous. Printers survive by understanding which truth may be printed, which must be implied, and which can be sold only after midnight.
At the table
Treat literacy and specialist knowledge as access. The question is not simply whether a character can read, but which texts they were taught to trust.