0011 — The Five Pillars as an instructional grouping

• Status: accepted
• Date: 2026-08-02
• Governs: src/lib/academy/pillars.ts, /academy/pillars (SURF-22), /academy, /, /philosophy/doctrine, Charter Book I Chapter II

Decision

The Academy's Seven Schools are grouped beneath five Pillars — Capital, Creation, Human Performance, Leadership, Civilization — forming a single ladder:

Mission (increase human capability)
  → Five Pillars
    → Seven Schools
      → Programs → Courses → Lessons → Projects → Real-world results

The Pillars are an instructional grouping. They are subordinate to the six public domains in the Doctrine of Capability (health, character, knowledge, leadership, capital, creation) and do not replace, rename, or reorder them. Every Pillar names the capabilities it develops, so the two structures remain reconcilable in one direction only: capabilities are doctrine, Pillars are pedagogy.

Codex 1 Article IV separately names eight institutional strengths used to test the institution itself. Those strengths and the six public capability domains are distinct taxonomies and must not be presented as the same list.

Why

Seven schools presented as a flat list read as a catalogue of subjects. The argument for their number is a claim about failure modes — financial literacy without character creates exploitation; leadership without wisdom creates tyranny; technology without ethics creates unintended consequences — and that argument needs a visible structure. Five Pillars supply it without inventing a rival taxonomy of capability.

The single test

Will this make someone more capable? is recorded as the question that precedes the Six Questions of Codex 1 Article III. It is a filter for scope, not a substitute for the constitutional gate: a proposal that passes the single test still answers all six.

Consequences

• The homepage now opens with what Anabasis is (the ascent, the pillars, the ladder) before what it has; the six capabilities and the prologue remain below.
• /philosophy/doctrine carries the objective, the core philosophy, and the "why seven schools" argument ahead of the capability glossary, which is unchanged.
• Pillar membership lives in one place. Any surface needing the grouping reads PILLARS / pillarSchools() rather than restating it.
• A sixth Pillar, or a school moving between Pillars, is a recorded decision.