Education Institution

The Education Institution (教育機関, Kyōiku Kikan) are an antagonistic group of smiling face cultists in Black★★Rock Shooter DAWN FALL.

Overview
The Education Institution commits genocide in the name of education, which they value as one of the qualities to becoming human, one that allowed humanity to evolve. Their leader, Smiley, justifies their genocidal acts as eliminating anything that obstructs education, because he claims they are the only group that sincerely cares about the evolution of mankind. He views what the Institution does as "educating the unenlightened and the ignorant".

Members of the group can easily be identified by the bright-yellow mask that they wear, marked with an unsettling grinning face. Their uniform is predominantly white with gold accents, although Smiley himself wears nothing but a red cape when he appears in front of the group. The Education Institution travels on a massive transport vehicle large enough to carry the entire group, their own fleet of individual vehicles, and have a bedchamber solely for their leader.

The Education Institution also keeps a number of young girls meant to be used as sacrifices in a ritual for Smiley, who also uses them as sex slaves. The Education Institution sends these girls on their military freight trains to sacrifice them at their destination.

History
The Education Institution first appears in The Good, The Bad & The Mechanics. Lunatic meets with Smiley and commands him to pursue Empress, the reactivated Hemiteos Unit, by using all the Education Institution's military strength. Smiley gives a rousing speech to his subordinates about humans, whom he states were no better than animals when they first came into existence. However, their redeeming quality is that humans can take something and transform it through education, the environment, and mechanics. If they were without education and mechanics, they could not be called humans. He claims their nature can be outsourced to a device, and commands the Institution to learn all that humans have to offer and embrace their very essence so that they may assume the role of a human and be led down the road to perfection by him. The Institution then rolls out on their own individual vehicles.

The group on their fleet of their vehicles appear again at the end of Shooter Meets Hacker, where the Colonel spots them heading in the direction of the Peacebuilding Forces base from afar. In Master Sniper, they are shown to be pursuing an escaped sacrificial girl named Momiji. Believing they were after herself, Empress goes to meet the group head-on and saves Momiji from them.

Members

 * Smiley - Leader of the Education Institution. His full alias is Schoolmaster Smiley.
 * Charlotte - The only known female member of the Institution.
 * Unnamed commander who wears a mask with X-shaped eyes and has a halo above his head.