Unexpected

Letting your mind wander in class was definitely not exclusive to Earthlings...

Compared to Kakashi and Obito's generation, Konoha's Ninja Academy now truly felt like a school. The teachers taught proper academic material, while the students below racked their brains in every possible way.

It was nothing like Kakashi's day. In Kakashi's words—those bastards never treated you as students. They assumed you were violent lunatics with a fanatical urge to kill, then gave you crash courses in murder.

Neither approach could really be called better or worse. At the very least, graduation assessments during peacetime placed greater emphasis on overall competence, and the standards were far stricter than during wartime. More than ninety percent of students would basically have to go back and repeat their studies, with only a handful graduating. In terms of fundamentals, they were certainly far better grounded than the trainees churned out during the war.

A Ninja Academy was never meant to teach powerful ninjutsu. It was merely a place for cultivating fundamental abilities. For ninja, building a foundation was just as important as learning powerful ninjutsu. Starting early was not enough; if the method was wrong, it could even have the opposite effect. A systematic mechanism for cultivating fundamental skills was actually more important than the amount of time spent training. The average ability of ninja from the Five Great Shinobi Villages far surpassed that of other organizations precisely because of their outstanding systems for foundational training. And only a peacetime ninja academy could truly fulfill that role, since an organization would not require it to produce large numbers of soldiers in a short period.

That said, the abysmal pass rate of peacetime ninja academies probably had something to do with the scene before them. This generation of Konoha children, raised in a peaceful environment,