Han school
They taught samurai etiquette, the classical Confucian books, calligraphy, rhetoric, fighting with swords and other weapons; some also added subjects such as medicine, mathematics and Western sciences.
These institutions were known as hangaku (藩学), hangakkō (藩学校) or hankō (藩黌/藩校), but since there was no official requirement of what a han school has to be or to do, the terminology varied.
[3] They learnt kangaku-juku (Confucian sciences) and military arts[4] Some upper-class samurai were legally required to get formal schooling, but most could choose not to.
[7][8] The idea behind the han school learning was to build character of a future state servant: discipline and knowledge of the appropriate etiquette were believed to be as important as the cultivation of intellect.
[13] By the end of the Edo period, about a third of han schools incorporated kokugaku, while a quarter of them taught at least some rangaku (Western studies, mainly medicine, military and naval sciences).
[8] Students would read Chinese books in the morning, then spend afternoons mastering Japanese martial arts, which were seen as a set of local skills that balances the purely intellectual studies acquired from abroad.
[12] The han school was built around the assumption that all the truth was supposedly already captured in the Chinese classics and could be extracted with diligent study; the idea of the endless pursuit of knowledge that requires constant questioning and discovery was not accepted.
[27] Students did not interpret the text or hold debates about it: because of the idea that the "correct" meaning of the classics had been long discovered, these activities were excluded from the learning process, appearing only sporadically among the literati.
[32] Exams, graduation certificates and the gradual increase in difficulty of the educational material were introduced in the later half of the Edo period.
[33][16] In the years directly preceding the Boshin War, most samurai children except for the lowest-rank families were educated in han schools.
[35] They also taught some introductory classes, while the alternating students on duty woke everyone up at dawn, informed teachers that the lecture time is about to start, patrolled the grounds, wrote down the weather conditions and recorded all accidents.
