You have an extremely simplistic view of civilizations that lasted longer than almost all the ones currently existing. Imagine someone in year 4000 dismissing the French peoples as a whole as “violent and bitter enemies of scientific truth” who “decayed into superstition” because of something Charlemagne done, and some other cherry picked events from a millennium+ long history. This is so simplistic to border on satire.
An ancient Roman urban legend (a story Romans told about themselves) says that a Roman inventor once created a method of producing unbreakable glass. He showed this to the emperor by dropping a glass chalice on the ground, where it bent instead of breaking, then he hammered it back into shape. According to this legend, the Roman emperor asked if anybody else knew how to make it. The inventor said no, he was the only one. So the emperor had him killed on the spot, to prevent the disruption of the Roman glass industry.
I think it never actually happened, but this sort of story reveals a Roman perspective on technological innovation in Roman society.
Here I go making an irrelevant sidetracked comment, but Charlemagne is an interesting example to pick considering the main domestic policies he's associated with are educational reforms and making it available to more people.
