The two main causes of the above problems were that Franz had spread himself too thin, launching too many major construction projects at once, and that the Austrian Empire was inherently lacking in the foundations of a great power.
The Austrian Empire contained too many ethnic groups, with differing languages and cultures, while its mountainous terrain had created one isolated geographical unit after another.
This made the initial investment costs extremely high. Take teachers alone—if it had been any country other than the Austrian Empire, it would have been absolutely impossible to find so many people talented in different languages to teach.
It was not unusual for Austrian adults to speak an average of three languages, but most children could not manage that. Most of them only spoke their own ethnic language.
At the same time, mixed and interwoven settlement was extremely common throughout the Austrian Empire, so a teacher generally had to be proficient in at least three languages. This greatly increased the difficulty and cost of education.
Apart from teaching itself, there were also far too few schools. That was why education spending had become so staggering. After all, raising towering buildings from flat ground was no easy task.
This also directly led to another problem: investment efficiency was exceedingly low. Although the Austrian Empire invested more than ten times as much as Prussia, the results were simply not in the same league.
Prussia could keep its illiteracy rate at around 10%, while the Austrian Empire was still striving to bring its rate below 60%.
But Franz's efforts had not been in vain. The figures above only counted illiteracy in the narrow sense—anyone unable to read and write in German was considered illiterate.
Without that restriction, the Austrian Empire's illiteracy rate had already fallen below 50%.
And as