Raised hand.

Raised hand. "Thank you. To the parents and guardians here, what should one do when a child breaks a parent's rule that needs to be followed? Throw them out of the house to fend for themselves?"

"Wearing myself out in the yard never did me any harm."

"Of course not. It depends on the means of the parents. If one is wealthy, one can have the servants confine the child to a single room, or take away something they care about, until they are willing to follow the rule. Or one can hit him, if the child is a boy, it's bad for girls to be hit. I don't know what poor families do for disobedient girls. Possibly hit them anyways."

“If the child already have some measure of obedience and discipline there is a variety things you can do besides beating them to punish them.  Assigning physical exercises or mental exercise or extra chores, to name a few options.  Even for children as young as 5.”

She hopes she isn’t weakening her younger sisters by not beating him, but faced with the question directly she realizes she isn’t sure she’s not.

"Obviously you've got to physically punish them if it's for something important. Them not wanting to sit in a boring room for hours doing figuring is not important."

Did girls' school have less of that because it was for girls, she thought it just increased as you got older.

Why would it be worse for girls to be hit? This is very supremely not the point, though.

"Whether we force children to go to school is a different question than whether we allow any punishments besides expulsion. We can give parents the option not to send their children to school. If we make it illegal for a teacher to use any discipline besides expulsion to maintain order, we take away the option for anyone to run a school for children young enough that it isn't much loss to their parents. It's a very rare six-year-old who can follow every necessary rule on the first try, even if they want to, so it's a very rare child who will be permitted to stay. We all agree that the punishments in schools need extreme reform. I don't think that means that we need to take away all realistic means of correction."

"I have never been a young Boy," her sex started as 'girl' and became 'wizard' at some point, "and perhaps they have some Ineffable Difference from young Girls. Certainly the practice of Schools to Beat, Lash, and Injure their Students was ever a Distraction from my studies, one which I found a Baffling Irrelevancy until after the lifting of Hell's Yoke," specifically, over a year after, when this committee kept bringing it up inexplicably "whereupon I realized" during the composition of this very sentence "that the Reason had been Plain to See; Hell's Tyrant wished his Odious Tyranny scrawled on the Bodies of Children."

It's actually kind of infuriating that the supreme waste of time (for both students) that was being made to whip some classmate chosen however-they-chose-them every so often had a reason; it was easy to not care when it was just yet another arbitrary imposition that happened for no reason. Decades out of school, she's finding this upsetting. And it has reached back from the past to resume wasting her time at this very moment.

(Law school wasn't like that; law school was a different sort of dangerous and traumatic, and she's updated no opinions on it.)

"Chair Tallandria, perhaps you have raised a Boy and can Attest that Children of that Sex need be Beaten; I would remain skeptical even with this Testimony. Certainly the Piteous Wailing that Results is a Clamor quite Injurious to any effort to Read or Write at one's Studies. I am made Aghast to think on what heights, absent such Noise, my own youthful Studies might have attained."

Being upset isn't visible on her face, only a tiny bit audible in her tone at most, but it's making her sloppy; sentence-compositional tasks like disclaiming that she's not denouncing Korva as Asmodean (she's not!), clarifying her original wording (plenty of permissible non-beating punishments remain! the wording is so loose you could probably get away with shutting students in an iron maiden!), and the like have gone unaddressed where they normally would have.

"Look, there's beatings and there's beatings."

She slaps her own wrist.

"That is a corporal punishment, not done to remove someone. It is quick. It is not traumatic. It is barely painful. - it would probably be better to do it with a ruler, actually, that literally didn't hurt at all. It does not disrupt the flow of class, and it is inflicted without any ill effects on a child of either sex. You need a punishment like that, for training children not to speak out of turn, in a class that may have forty or fifty students, or no one can be heard."

"Taking time out of class to conduct whippings - let along forcing children to whip one another - is a different matter entirely."

Forty or fifty students in one class?  How do they teach anything under those conditions?  Thea is realizing she has no idea how education for the common person previously worked.

She tries to work on a sensible wording for allowable minor punishment, but can’t think of one that doesn’t run into uncertainties around how things function outside the monastery.

"I apologize, Chair Tallandria, for speaking Imprecisely and perhaps giving Insult through my own Carelessness," she replies, calmer now. "Such a thing is scarcely Hellish, falling into those Pains which inhere to mere Existence on the Material, and of course you are no Friend of Hell. All are invited to amend my Wording, if it be Impractical."

"In discussing more substantial punishment, the committee would do well to remember that some Chelish schools train adults, not children, and are tasked with preparing them for military service."

Yeah, well, maybe they shouldn't. ...he'll sit on his remaining credibility for the moment.

"I do not think the exact nature of punishments to be used in schools is a matter for the highest law of the Empire," he says. "We might simply adopt a resolution that we condemn cruelty toward children especially among all the other cruelties of the old regime, and perhaps a principle that all punishments to be used on children must be ultimately salutary toward the child's upbringing, and let people with more expertise work out the details. It might actually be wise to have such a law apply to parents as well as schools, though I don't know how we'd enforce it."

Archdukes are pretty sensible. Every committee should have an archduke. A potential rules proposal? No, it'd impose on the archdukes...

"As much as I hate to get bogged down in this, many people with existing expertise absolutely claim that being whipped is good for you. - what are you imagining one would do to a parent who is found to have harmfully punished a child?"

....honestly being whipped probably is good for you, when you deserve it and you keep all of your flesh, but she's not sure she wants to say that.

See, this is why Raimon didn't even try to make laws about awful parents who would like to force their kids to go or not go to school. Just stop literally paying people out of the government's purse to hit kids. If they do it on their own time that's not nearly as much his business to go making laws about even though he would totally help a kid who tugged on his sleeve and said "Avenger, my daddy hits me all the time, do some Avenging".

"Whip them, I suppose, ironic as it may seem—I don't think it's worth pursuing, it would be impossible to consistently catch people at it; the children themselves can't or won't report it, especially if we aren't forcing them to go to school where they'll be away from their parents."

"As far as the people who think being whipped is good for a child, that's just the known problem of removing people—influenced by Asmodeanism—from positions of trust, or at least getting them to see the error of their ways. There's supposed to be another committee solving that, though I don't think they're approaching it in a particularly productive direction at the moment."

“My understanding is that there are too many teachers to straightforwardly replace them all, even scaling back schooling to essential reading skills?  And thus we need to provide some hard limits to guide them.  So we could make a general statement condemning cruelty, and we could agree on some hard limits on punishments for people under 16, making clear this is the outer boundary of what is acceptable?  Maybe a wording like: ‘No punishment which the child subject to does not fully physically recover from by the next day shall be permitted?’ I’m not skilled at legal wordings but something along those lines?”

It leaves it kind of ambiguous how magical healing factors in, but maybe the other delegates will imagine that ambiguity favorably and they can move towards a compromise?

"The principle seems sound; I'm not sure if your proposed limit is the one I would propose, but we can work from it."

"On the other hand, a person who believes whipping is salutary is likely to be cruel to children in more subtle ways even if whipping is banned. We may not be able to replace them all now, but we ought be able to weed out the worst. Perhaps there ought to be someone in every school to whom children can report a cruel teacher—the other teachers could also report, if the children don't."

"I agree that a proposal not to be cruel to children doesn't mean anything by itself. If one thinks something is justified, one doesn't think it's cruel, except perhaps in the case where the punishment isn't one you're meant to come back from. I do think we've just demonstrated that physical punishments are one of the biggest concerns about the schools, and should probably have some means of addressing those concerns."

"Delegate Iroria's suggestion isn't a bad one. It's limiting - I would certainly not want to give parents such advice - but given the teachers we're working with, it may be best to limit them, and require expulsion for more substantive problems - for a day, not longer."

"I do think it's plausible that a majority of the teachers ought to be replaced with non-wizards without direct teaching experience, in the immediate term." ...most of them will probably also think that whipping is sometimes good for children, because she's pretty sure most parents think that? But there are degrees of cruelty, here.

"Teaching is a skill. Teaching a class of forty or fifty productively is a specialized one. Many of the teachers imported from Galt retain it. The wizards imported from Andoran, where schools have been disrupted for the past ten years, do not have it. At Corentyn we have seen best results by pairing these with an experienced Chelish teacher, but obviously this increases costs."

She looks at Imperia with a raised eyebrow. "And what have you heard of Absalom teachers?"

"That they are few. Capable wizards, and a good number of capable lecturers of adults, such that we can use them in the academies for older students. But I understand that most of Kortos is still using an apprenticeship system for training core skills."