Academy
An academy, in The Wheel of Time, is a school of learning and invention endowed in a great city so that knowledge will not vanish again as it did in the Breaking of the World.
Academies appear late, taking shape from a certain point onward. The word names schools of learning endowed in several great cities of the Westlands, conceived with a single purpose: that knowledge should not be lost again as it was in the Breaking of the World, when the wonders of the Age of Legends vanished along with the people who understood them. An academy gathers scholars, craftsmen, and inventors under one roof and pays them to study, to teach, and to build, an idea with little precedent in an age when learning otherwise shelters in the White Tower, among village Wisdoms, or in the libraries of the wealthy. The earliest such school is housed in a lord's former manor in the city of Cairhien, and others in other lands follow the same pattern, each drawing the curious, the learned, and the merely odd in equal measure.
How far into Wheel of Time have you read?
Set your place and this page rewrites itself to exactly that point. Nothing ahead of you will show.