Aztec education split along two main tracks, and the calmecac's priestly formation stood alongside, and in tension with, the telpochcalli, the neighborhood school that trained the great majority of commoner boys chiefly for warfare and civic life. A boy's family and calpulli, the local kin-based ward, generally determined which path he followed, though the calmecac was not formally closed to commoners of sufficient promise, and the two institutions were understood as producing the two kinds of service, religious and martial, that Mexica society depended on most directly, war itself carrying strong religious meaning in Aztec theology as a primary source of the sacrificial captives the state religion required.
Within Tenochtitlan's temple precinct, tlamacazque of different ranks and specializations served the city's many temples simultaneously, from the great dual shrine of the Templo Mayor down to smaller neighborhood and calpulli temples, giving the priesthood a scale and internal complexity that colonial-era chroniclers, drawing on the memories of Nahua informants who had themselves grown up within or alongside these institutions, worked to reconstruct in unusual ethnographic depth after the conquest disrupted the system itself.