Professor Coeliaris didn't have time to get here early and set up, and she's missing her favorite chair already. 

Raimon is possibly oversubscribed on committees but he feels at his most properly Calistrian when he thinks about vibrant friends and pretty boys he once knew showing up every day to feed a little more of themselves into the meat grinder.

Thea would like to ensure a role for Irori’s faith in education, but doesn’t have many personal goals here besides that.  For the sake of the country as a whole, she would like something better than what she has heard of the old schools.  So she just needs to ensure the chair isn’t actively hostile to herself.

Dia is watching faces and taking notes. 

Lluïsa has graduated from a few schools in her day.

She actually thrived fairly well in them. Sort of. The less said about law school and the less visible skin, the better.

But, it's good that there are wizard schools. She doesn't have many object-level opinions and was surprised to find herself having that one.

Imperia is here to see that Cheliax's best and brightest continue being shaped into useful tools of the new state, instead of languishing uselessly on their parents' farms, or being wasted for lack of direction.

Her imp familiar is not present, useful as it is for note taking. The new teachers are so sensitive.

Cheliax should find a way to teach every child to read, and also not whip them half to death with a fucking cat for not doing their homework in middle school. Except apparently they weren't even successfully doing that first thing?? Literacy rates seem way lower in Cheliax as a whole than she thought they were before attending the convention. But also way higher than the fucking resurrected nobles seem to assume.

Whatever. Schools without cats. It's a platform.

He is also here. 

Molochio is several years past his formal schooling, but is a good deal closer to it than most other delegates. Despite his obvious academic talents, school was a living hell for him, and he still has more than a bit of a grudge against the Chelish education system because of it.

Also, while the floor debate centered around wizard schools, Molochio himself is more interested in the status of primary schools. (Like many educated non-wizards in Cheliax, even under the old regime, he resents the extent to which the Thrunes seemed to view childhood schooling as a way to stripmine the nation for children to throw into meat grinders (sorry, wizard academies) effectiveness at any other sort of education be dammed.)

All this to say, he really thinks the committee should have someone who thinks that children should get to learn things and not get beaten for no good reason, whether they have a native talent for wizardry or not. 

He signed up for this committee after seeing the sorts of people who were signing up already. Idealists who think the crown can enlighten the masses, and diabolists who want to bring the old new order back. Nowhere near enough people who have had an unbiased look at "public education" from the outside to see it for the horror it is.

...Apart from the problems inherent to the concept, Alfons-Valentí suspects these fools will have put no thought into financing this damned endeavor and will happily strip the crown of funds it needs for more worthy projects. Or call for new taxes. They will need a voice of reason.

Just close the fucking torture-factories, this isn't complicated.

It literally has not occurred to Nuria that anyone might be in favor of continuing public education. Obviously that's a bad idea. But learning to read is still good, you should probably have at least one person who can read in any given community, and a good selection of books to read aloud from. She's not sure if that's practical? But this seems like a good place to find out. 

Lluïsa, to great internal embarrassment, makes a mental connection about Korva Tallandria! Due to some coincidences at a cafe and the particular way her mnemonic techniques organize things, she'd been holding two mental Korvas until just this instant.

"I would nominate the Archduke," she says.

She absolutely does not want the Archduke who wants to keep the schools chairing the committee. "I think it should be someone who's actually had to go to the schools."

This is going to be a headache. His hope that the committee would be populated entirely by people who at least think that education, in the abstract, is good, seems to have failed. At least the Desnan likes romances and so will probably agree that people should be able to read.

"I accept Delegate Oriol's nomination."

"I nominate Raimon Pages." 

"Really? All right, if you want."

Well, it would be weird to nominate herself, and he is, you know, also a chaotic cleric, they probably have some overlapping priorities! 

That's... Calistria's symbol, right? Why does the butterfly girl want a whore to lead the committee?

Not another fucking Calistrian. "If experience with the education system under the old regime is a necessary qualification then I can withdraw myself and nominate Delegate Tallandria in my place."

Korva was in favor of Theopho right?  And surprisingly capable for a commoner.

“I second that nomination.”

He's not going to win the chair so he won't even try... He doesn't want a calistrian running this committee but it's not like he wants the archduke or the lawyer or the archduke's proxy or any of the professors running it either.

"I nominate delegate - " squint " - Quintana." He has no idea who she is, besides presumably having been drawn by lot, but she seems to have the right mindset.

Mmm. Imperia did, of course, attend public school as a child, and she did, of course, excel. But pride is double-edged sword, in politics. The archduke recognizes the value of education, and selected Tallandria. As did the Irorite, who can be expected to see the value of perfection. The others, she expects, would burn the institution to the ground for hurting their feelings. 

"I support delegate Tallandria as chair."

"I'll do it if people want," she says to the person who nominated her. She doesn't know how you run a committee, but how hard can it really be?

"Delegate Tallandria should, I trust, satisfy any Objections."

"She's also fine."

Shrug. "Sure."

What the fuck, guys.

" - fine. I've never chaired anything, so feel free to demand another vote and change your mind if you all decide you're very unhappy with your choices. I went to school in Egorian from ages six to fifteen, at which point I was expelled for failure to do my work, whipped half to death, and didn't get up again for three weeks."

"I have been getting the the impression that the convention has wildly different impressions of what the educational situation in Cheliax is, without getting into what it can be or should be. So I want to begin by going around the room and saying - how you were educated, what you got out of it, what you think your peers with similar educations got out of theirs - what you think most people like you do and don't know, academically - and then what you think education ought to look like, if you want to. Everyone goes, I want everyone to hear everyone else. Archduke, you first."

This is going to make him look out of touch. Tallandria probably isn't making him do it specifically for that reason, but—well, to the extent that he is actually out of touch, he wants to know, but his opinion doesn't actually have much to do with his personal experience and it'll be unfortunate when people act like it does anyway.

"Of course. I should clarify, first, that I was born more than seven hundred years ago. I have spent most of the intervening centuries a statue, and was rescued recently by the Archmage Naima—I was educated by tutors, as most noble children are. At a young age I learned to read, write, and do figures; when I was older I was educated in history, religion, and matters of governance, as well as an apprenticeship in wizardry. The chief flaw in my education, I think, is that it is seven hundred years out of date. The chief benefit is—well, I absolutely could not do my job without it. No nobleman could. But I don't think that the education of nobles is what this committee was formed to discuss. Even if the old regime has made a mess of it, it's not a matter for the constitution."

"Few people will get precisely the same things out of an education that I did, and it would be inconceivable to educate every child in the same manner that I was. But I think that being able to use one's letters and numbers, at least, has a great value to everyone. I can hardly imagine what it would be like not to be able, and so I would forgive someone for not realizing the value of their education, if it was forced upon them by servants of Hell with blood and pain. But the wisdom of holy Aroden attests that an educated society is a prosperous one, and—one of the things that I bring to this table is the memory of a time when widespread schooling was a thing that virtuous people wanted to do, and could not for lack of wealth, not an imposition by the tyrants of the Pit. I do not actually know that we have the wealth now, the progress of the centuries before the Thrune empire notwithstanding, with our country so in need of other repairs and no coffers of the Outer Planes to feed our own. But I do think that education is a worthy enough goal that this committee ought to investigate whether we do."

"I went to school right here in Westcrown from when I was five till I was nearly sixteen. I learned to read and add. Those are good things to know. I learned that if you trap a lot of children in a room where reading and adding are the order of the day you will wind up with a suspicious fraction of your class growing up to be zombies that breathe. Less good to know." And his teachers are lucky that he doesn't know where they live yet, but he's not going to say that part aloud.

"I was raised and taught by the Hellish cult the Sisterhood of Eiseth.  I learned unarmed combat (including grappling, punching, and kicking), armed combat (including the use of short sword, longbow, and various nonstandard weapons), the basics of reading and writing, catechism of the Hellgod Eiseth and various related Gods, stealth, disguise, meditation intended to eventually develop monkish abilities such as the usage of Ki, and assassination related lore.  My sisters formerly of the cult were similarly raised and educated.  Since being free of the cult, I've attempted to expand my and their education, mostly focusing on reading holy texts of the major non-evil Gods.  My understanding is that reading and writing are standard among Chelish people that attended school, but that the rest of my education is unique.  I've also heard smarter Chelish kids get the foundations of wizardry which seems useful."  

"Anyway, I am absolutely sure education ought to include reading and writing, writing is extremely useful and with reading you can expand your education on your own later.  I think the pain and tortures which I've heard were used regularly in normal schools are unnecessary and probably even detrimental for learning... once a student has started to appreciate the value of education they shouldn't need pain for motivation.  I think meditation and some physical exercise are useful to mix in with reading and writing to counteract boredom and restlessness and balance the development of the mind with the body."

She'll hold off on trying to elaborate on the exact distinction between sparring or intense exercise and tortures.  She is still kind of figuring it out herself. 

"My education began with perhaps fifty years of tutelage under my mother. My studies then encompassed not only the arcane arts but also philosophy, history, the principles of magic, the upper and lower planes, geography, history, mechanical and architectural skills, as well as many other arts By my eightieth year, I had already immersed myself in magical studies, particular spellcraft and the metaphysical principles of arcane energy manipulation. This comprehensive education culminated in my embrace of Arodenite philosophy at age ninety. Because of my convictions, upon reaching my centennial, I concluded my familial education and set out for Cheliax to contribute to the building of the Age of Glory.  At the Westcrown University of Wizardry, I furthered my arcane studies, and began to truly contribute to the Great Work, by contributing my own research, as well as and teaching others, as well as being appointed a minor Professorship.  

Coeliaris frowns.  "The age of glory did not happen, but the Great Work continues. Over the past century, I've participated in numerous colloquies and symposia, presenting my findings and engaging in scholarly debates with fellow wizards. These intellectual exchanges have been crucial in advancing our collective understanding of Spell-Topology. I take pride in the substantial contributions I've made, particularly in reducing the Primary Circle Requirements of several spells, and in training many generations of talented mages who have gone on to make their own marks on the arcane world."

"I grew up in the Heartlands, closer to Egorian than anything else you've heard of but not really that close to anything you could call a city. I can do letters and figures and recite probably dozens of reasons why Asmodeus is the greatest of the gods and we should all worship him." The last part is said sarcastically.

"Some of my classmates were slower than me, and can't even do figures. Jasó couldn't do much of anything but he was always a little funny in the head. Some of them were quicker than me, and can do some figures that I can't. My first daughter was a lot quicker, and they packed her off to wizard school in Egorian. I don't know what happened to her after that, and none of my other children made the same mistake.

We weren't allowed to skip even for the harvest, but they couldn't very well enforce that so mostly we all got beaten a lot afterwards. Not like they weren't doing plenty of that anyway.

I think we should burn every one of the schools to the ground. ...Not literally, the fire might catch."

You know, that's a great idea. Maybe tonight.

"I went to school in Laekastle from the ages of six to fifteen and got whipped what I think was a basically usual amount for my school. I don't know how that compares to other schools but I think probably this committee is not best served by everyone--from this century, I mean, and not a noble--taking off their shirts to compare the severity of our whipping scars. I learned to read and write, which is good, and do basic sums, which I did find useful later in life, and I met the friend who bribed me with my first foreign book, which was excellent but obviously can't be credited to the school. Anyway, public school was obviously hot garbage but I do think it would be good to teach enough people to read that any given community has someone who can read aloud to everyone else." 

Most of Thea’s injuries got healed before they could scar,  but she had a lot more variety than just whip injuries.  

Also, she would have thought Nuria of all people would appreciate everyone knowing how to read, but maybe the schools were just that bad.  That’s a depressing thought.  

Apparently she has to go be on some random committee or the archduke will decide to piss away all of Cheliax's finances on his own vanity projects. She hates every part of this, but she was never foolish enough to think that making the army actually work for once would be fun.

"I grew up in Sirmium. I was a good student, as they go - I learned to read and do figures, didn't disrespect the teacher despite his rampant idiocy, and only occasionally got the whip. And then I grew up and went to work for real, and just like anyone could have told you none of it mattered worth a damn. I could count on one hand the times that wasting years of my life like that was useful and still have fingers left over, and obviously none of the whippings they use to convince people to ignore that and stick around actually instills anyone with any discipline."

She claps.

From the ages of six to eleven I, uh went to school in Corentyn, It was one of the schools specifically for rich people and nobles, so I learned a lot there, reading, writing, calculation, and the foundations of wizardry like most other schools, but also, uh, history and rhetoric and politics and, uh, theology. I did well in my lessons, but, uh, I wasn’t very good at being Asmodean, and the teachers and other kids hurt me a lot. When I was, uh, eleven my parents realized I wouldn’t make it if I had to go to wizard school and, uh, managed to get me apprenticed to an alchemist, and I haven’t been back to school since. My master died shortly before the war, Nethys chose me, around that time, and now I am here, I guess. 

"For my own Part, I was Born in this very City of Westcrown, some thirty-seven years ago and hence my Schooling was wholly within the Span of the Infernal Regime. My Father while not Prominent among the Burghers was yet of some Means, and I attended a Private Academy first, excelling there, and next studied Wizardry at the Academy for that Discipline also here in Westcrown. Being directed upon the Track of Law early, I followed a Preparatory Course for, and then attended, the Lodge, and graduated it also, being Licensed and Barred."

And grievously indebted. And estranged from her father, although she would have been grievously indebted regardless. It's not that kind of estrangement.

"All the Schools aforementioned, I would note, had their Establishment well before the years of the Tyrant Thrunes, and in the years when holy Aroden was the Established Deity, were not Bent to serve Hell. Though I recognize I am Atypical, there were many Students like me, and I confess myself Unaware of which Rigors of Advanced Schooling are of Hell, and which are of Schooling."

Well, not entirely; being at the mercy of a called devil is definitely of Hell. When Nuria mentions it, some small part of her does want to show off her scars; she would win.

This hardly seems the most productive opening exercise, but ah well.

"Going to school in Cheliax was, frankly, the best thing that ever happened to me. In Taldor, a man decides what happens to his daughters, and may marry or indenture them as he chooses. But I was born to a farmer in Cheliax, and I did not belong to my father. I belonged to Asmodeus. And under Asmodeus, the best and brightest girls and boys born to farmers were selected for routes that made full use of their talents. When I was twelve, I went to the preparatory academy in Macini, and whatever I suffered there was much less than my father would have inflicted on me, had it been his decision. When I was sixteen, I had the marks to attend the magical academy in Corentyn. Instead of farming, cooking, and sewing, I studied geometry, topology, geography, history, planar languages, and, above all, the arcane arts. I stand before you a wizard of the fourth circle, and I am of far greater use to her Majesty than a farmer's wife could ever be. The peers that I remember from my academy days were desperate to remain in school, and not be sent back home to their farms."

"I am told that the archmage Naima was also born a farmer's daughter, and didn't learn to read until the age of twenty-one. What a waste, for the world, if she had never met a man educated by our own public school system, and capable of recognizing and unlocking her potential. I see no reason that, now that we are not of Asmodeus, we should be like Taldor, or Osirion, in this respect, and condemn the greater part of our national genius to plow the fields at the behest of their fathers. And it is the greater part of every country's genius, make no mistake. Far more of our accomplished wizards were born to farmers and tradesmen than to nobles."

"Does Iomedae have no need of wizards?  No need for theologians? I doubt it. So I say, let us channel our schools, and our students, towards good. Let us reform the primary schools, in particular, not to demand of future farmers what they have no need for. But let us not allow a return to even more wasteful petty tyrannies, in our rush to be free of the great one."

This lady thought belonging to Asmodeus was great fun because she likes math. Nobody should listen to her about channeling anything towards Good.

...Delegate Caballé can't literally be Delegate Quintana's missing daughter; names aside, the young Ms. Quintana was brought to Egorian, not Macini. 

But she sounds a very similar story. Nuria is pretty sure Delegate Caballé is just wrong about the life an ordinary farmer's daughter lives and would have been better off that way. 

She's a little rusty at hiding her true thoughts, but old habits die hard and she doesn't let a flicker of her pity cross her face. 

Being an ordinary peasant farmer’s daughter sounds like it would be horrible for Thea personally, but maybe other people would find it tolerable or somehow even enjoyable.  Maybe that’s the key to finding a compromise here, voting for a system that allows kids to make their own path.

"I dare say that the story of my education is less dramatic than that. Like the archduke, I was tutored in literacy, in numbers, in morals and in governance and in history. I was given thorough but hardly comprehensive instruction in the theory of magic, but not the practice - I did not have the aptitude. I certainly benefited from my education, but I do not imagine I would have if I had been a farmer, rather than a lord, and I think if there would have been any benefit to a farmer, it would not have been one great enough so as to justify the costs, nor the torments that so many of you have described."

Well, that was less constructive than she was hoping, but maybe it's too much to ask people who sign up for an education committee to have more specific feelings about their own. Maybe she should have gone first. Whatever.

"All right. As I said, I attended school in Egorian. My mother was a clerk. My father was a lead worker. Every night, exhausted from the day's work, my mother would sit beside me and check that I was working. If I stopped, my mother would dig her nails into my shoulder, until I began to work again. Because she wanted so badly for me to have a better life than she did. I was tracked to be a wizard at twelve, and obviously I was in the half that didn't make it. My mother didn't even pick me up, when they expelled me, just left me bleeding in the street until my sister got there."

"I learned reading, writing, mathematics, history, Asmodean catechism, infernal, and practical arcana. History was the wildest, because every year they would take all of our old books and burn them, and replace them with new books that said completely different things, and of course you had to always act as if nothing at all had changed. Not just the new things, the old ones, too. I remember thinking - what is it, in here, that they have to do this? What deadly thing have they given us, year after year, so powerful that every year they must destroy their own tools?"

"But I tell you what else Egorian had, before the fire burned it down. Egorian had a library, theoretically for the school. Packed to the gills with propaganda, everything censored to hell and back, but if you were quiet and didn't cause any trouble, you could walk right in and read. I spent so many hours in that library. And the thing is, there were a handful of foreign books, and old books, and most of those had only been through two or three rounds of cuts, not eighty. When I was fourteen, I found a book in there about reading Skald, and I tell you, I was obsessed. If anything got me expelled, it was that book. There were six Skald books in the library, and I read them cover to cover three or four times."

"There was a poem - in Skald - about this wildly sprawling cast of barbarians, who keep killing each other at the slightest provocation. It concerns the wisest and best of men, who is brutally murdered by some other guys, at which point the whole countryside descends into chaos and bloodshed. It's very depressing, I'm sure that's why it was in there. But it has these moments. At one point this man discovers that his adopted son has been killed by his other sons. The censor cannot have spent more than thirty seconds on it, because the meter and alliteration were very lazily broken, so I knew that they had changed it. And I puzzled over the surrounding lines, until I realized that the only thing which fits at all is the word 'love'. I love my son. I wish that he had lived, and I had died. Somewhere, somewhen, the wisest of men had loved his son, not even his by blood, and had been unafraid to say so, and others had been unafraid to write it down. And sure, they were crazy and violent, but you couldn't call them weak."

"And once you see it it's everywhere, if not always quite so obvious. Parents who love their children. Children who love their parents. Codes of honor, standards of conduct. Loyalty! Chastity! Courtesy! The shadows of good, broken and confused, but never fully purged. And these things - the nature of men, the shape of their hearts, what things about them stay or change regardless of their setting - these things are relevant to everyone. Every farmer, every maid, every wizard, and every cleric. They tell us what we can be."

"So I have to say that I actually got quite a lot out of my education. The Prince of Hell gave me my letters, and with them I have robbed him half his riches. The Thrunes gave us our lockpicks, and then tried to break our fingers, they feared the tool so much. And half the nobles in that room out there? They don't realize we have it. They think they can pull whatever tricks they want, and the people of Cheliax won't even notice. But we will. We were trained on Hell's lies, and we know a mortal's just as well."

"I want every child in Cheliax to keep their lockpicks. I want to set before them a thousand chests to raid, with all their mysteries intact. I don't know how to do it without devils. I don't know if anyone knows how to do it without devils. But I think that's what we're here to discuss. How much we build, how much we salvage, and how much we pitch into the sea."

"So that's where we are. Where do you guys wanna go? - and does anyone have paper to write it down, because I sure don't."

Wow, she's actually a really compelling speaker, he kind of thought the time on the floor was a fluke.

He feels extremely vindicated in nominating her for the chair.

She wants that for every child that can take it.

It feels silly with such a small audience, but she claps anyway when Korva finishes.

And if the old schools would fail and brutally beat this woman, they were broken in all but the most basic of aspects.

"...But now that Asmodeus is gone we could just bring up children to be good without beating them into learning foreign poetry. I don't see why we need schools to tell people that parents should love their children."

"If there is one thing that was made apparent from hearing this variety of perspectives, it is that education should not be compulsory. Any child that needs to be beaten to remain at school simply should not be there. But we also have, here, people who willingly endured beatings to remain there. There would surely be many more children who would willingly attend a school that was not Asmodean."

"If you don't beat children who try to leave they'll just leave. No one wants to sit in a dusty classroom for hours on end being lectured about letters and figures and Iomedae. No one here willingly endured beatings, they'd beat you worse if you ran away."

”I spent so many hours in that library. And the thing is, there were a handful of foreign books, and old books, and most of those had only been through two or three rounds of cuts, not eighty.”

The most relatable thing he has heard all day. He wasn’t quite as bothered by the old regime’s constant re-editing of books as she seems to be, though— if nothing else it meant there was always more to read. 

Either way, good choice, random noble whose name Molochio has already forgotten. 

“—I—completely agree with Korva. I mean, I didn’t find my way through with history at all, I got lucky enough to get my hands on a book that was just foreign and not censored at all, and to love it enough to spend my life hunting down more. But—yeah, books are so important.”

"If you can build a schoolhouse that doesn't lock and has no power to chase down any kid who'd rather go play outside, more power to you. If the library was that for you, I'm glad of it. I think anyone who makes their career of keeping a pack of children in a place they don't want to be will, every single time, get crueler and harsher to force those children to stay put, instead of getting usefuller and pleasanter to encourage them to choose to stay. They'll only try being usefuller and pleasanter if the children can fuck off at whim."

“I learned enough about Irori to be chosen by him after the Four Day War because I could read.  Reading opens up so many possibilities.  And I know a child that will deliberately bait a punch to the face if it means an extra hour of reading.”

" - well, Delegate Pages, having worked in an Asmodean and now Iomedan orphanage, I'd say that's difficult in the general case. But speaking of schools, and not places tasked with actually raising children, I can imagine the system working. Anyone's guess if it would in the real world."

"Delegate Tallandria, had schools been voluntary, and you had chosen to play instead of going, how would your mother have responded?"

"By beating me, obviously. But she wouldn't've used a cat, so I'd say we're still ahead."

"As I imagined. My parents, on the other hand, would have beaten me for going. 'Voluntary' attendance in no way means that the choice belongs to the students."

Nor should it, of course; the reason this is so is that exceedingly few children are equipped to make reasonable decisions in any respect. But parents are little better.

"While this is true, Delegate Caballé, in less Asmodean societies it is normally assumed that parents have their children's best interests at heart in a way that no institution can."

"It might be the case that if you don't allow schools to force children to show up, some of their parents will pick up the slack in the one direction or the other. But their parents won't collect a payment for their great and noble service to the Chelish state every week they set about it, now, will, they."

"Parents collect their payment by using children for labor today, rather than investing in tomorrow."

"It would be appropriate, in an Abadaran sense, to pay the parents who send their children to school. I doubt, however, that we could afford it in practice. Indeed, I suspect that the first thing we should be discussing is whether we can afford schools at all. My understanding is that Hell sponsored the old ones; could anyone provide more details on the nature of that?"

"Hell provided most of the materials used in schools. Book copies, uniforms, etcetera. But the core of the program is its staff, and apart from this past year, all the teachers have been human for half a century. Without the currency crisis, I would see no reason why we couldn't end our habit of ordering a million new textbooks each year, and carry on much as we were. The difficulty lies in the transition."

“And what of paying for the teachers, where we must continue to impoverish farmers by growing enough spare food to feed the parasites? And all the while more land goes untilled because the children cannot both help farm and waste time in a classroom. If you want to claim that this is a minor expense, you are a liar or a fool - both because of the enormous fortune that already goes into it, and because that’s still not enough to keep it sustainable without all the bribes they collect from farmers to overlook their absence from the classroom. The buildings are hardly free either, when such places in the hearts of town could be used for a dozen other purposes. And we would still need to replace the books because a child does not take good care of fragile paper, or else treble the assigned teachers to make it manageable.”

"The average primary school teacher is perfectly competent to provide laundry and mending services for the entire community. In the days before mass education, farmers simply spent long hours on these tasks themselves. If you want to require that every teacher offer them, we can, but I think it's a bit much to call them 'parasites'."

"My primary school teacher wasn't a wizard, he was a dropout cleric."

"My apologies, Chair Tallandria, for noting your Eloquent Speech in Shorthand; I can Transcribe it when the Committee has Closed, and deliver those Pages later."

"Until the Balance of Trade has Normalized, the Importation of Foreign Books may be a Necessity for any desirable System of Education. Moreover the very Knowledge of which Books exist that would be Salutary to Import is, I am afraid, likely Scarce within the bounds of the Empire."

"An Office whose Purpose is to learn and know which Books exist may not be a vast Expense; the Importation of at least one Copy of each would be a greater Expense, and the Importation or Reproduction of Salutary Books en masse a greater one still. I would propose that each exist, but the Priority is in the order I stated them; having at the very least the Information, a school may plan Acquisitions from its own Budget."

Lluïsa is blasé about beatings in school but they keep coming up unproductively, so also:

"And I would first propose for a Vote; that Corporal Punishment, defined as the use of Physical Force beyond that necessary for Restraint and Removal of the Physically Unruly, be prohibited, Expulsion being the remedy for Intractable Students."

Hopefully that satisfies the Committee on Beatings and we can have one on Education!

"Aye."

Thea isn't sure how you instill an initial level of discipline without any physical force, but apparently the schools were using cat o' nine tails and nearly killing their students, so she isn't going to argue in favor of corporal punishment.  Hopefully the students with potential all have enough discipline to start with that they won't be expelled.

Oh wait, are they voting?  She'll wait for the chair to acknowledge the vote before joining in.

On the one hand, keeping the beatings would make the school even more of a poison pill on the floor. On the other hand, she's not going to be able to stop it and looking like she's trying is probably bad for her chances of killing this program. And it's not like expulsion - and thereby reducing the number of people in school - isn't also a win. 

"Aye."

"Aye." If this passes, then even if the insane people who want the schools open get their way, they'll all be closed again within the year.

"Aye." 

"Oh come on, people. Vote to ban even voluntary education of anyone under the age of ten or twelve honestly, if that's what you want. If that is your sincere intent, we will vote on it, whatever I think of the consequences. But we will not vote until we have discussed those consequences."

"How many of you consider yourselves to have raised a child under the age of seven?"

She raises her hand.

She puts her hand partway up.

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."

"Absalom is a city with an island attached, it's true. If we could produce enough books, perhaps with the new Fabricate, we could send picture books to everyone's home, and then just pick up the people who naturally learn to read from this?"

"'Picture books'?"

--Oh, wouldn't that be marvelous?

There's no way it's going to happen, of course. But what a beautiful fantasy. 

"Imagine a thick tome where each spread reveals an etching of creature, object, or action on the left, paired with a well-printed word on the right."

Delightful! Absurd! Impossible!

She hasn't ever heard of anyone learning to read on their own. "Sounds like a great idea, as long as you don't force anyone to go to school who doesn't pick up reading from that."

"If there really is a magic way to make them cheap, that might not be the worst option, but frankly it sounds like the kind of cheap solution where a month later you're paying a fortune for knickknacks and nobody benefits except the wizards." 

“Even with magic a book for every home might be too costly… but what about a set of essential books for every village above a certain size?  Maybe the holy texts of virtuous gods, copies of notable decrees and laws, and a few educational primers?  Including a few learning to read ’picture books’ like delegate Coeliaris describes.”

Thea doesn’t have the math or related knowledge to make an estimate of costs herself but maybe someone else will fill in.  She considers delegate Rado’s comment.

“Our country needs more clerics, and every person that can read and learn the teachings of the virtuous Gods is another chance for one of them to see a new potential cleric.  The benefit is clear to me.”

--Okay that one's actually halfway not insane. 

"I have no idea if that's remotely practical," it probably isn't, "but if it were, I think it would make sense." 

"I agree with Delegate Rado, children's books for every household sounds potentially very expensive. And not much substitute for a school system, if most children don't learn to read by looking at them. I've - well, I've heard of people learning to read from mere exposure to books, but I've never seen it." Korva has heard of a lot of things and doesn't particularly trust most of them. "But smaller libraries seem potentially valuable. Of course, if that's in addition to schools and not instead of them, we're now spending more money, not less."

"A village library is even better. I will inquire of our President (or perhaps Ibarra) if this is within the capacity of Fabricate. As it happens, Delegate Tallandria, a number of my colleagues at the Arcanamirium are reading autodidacts, and it would seem a reasonable sieve for wizards."

"Returning to my earlier Proposal; to establish Libraries we need first Identify and Catalog all those Books which exist, and of which Copies can be obtained; and if possible obtain at least one Copy of each such Book; I would propose an Office for the Cataloging of Books and an Imperial Library of All Books, the Office of Chief Librarian of which may be the same Office as that for Cataloging."

"I like your idea. Perhaps we could even mandate that each book and pamplet published beyond a run of say, twenty, is required to send a copy to this imperial library."

Ah, there's the money angle. She knew this whole nonsense about it being cheap was a smokescreen, but she kind of expected them to be able to stick with the lie for more than a handful of minutes. It's her own fault for overestimating them, she supposes.

"And how will Cheliax be affording this, again?"

"That is effectively, a very minor tax on the publication of larger runs on the publisher, for the benefit of all Cheliax. No cost to the state, other than the library space."

Deep breaths, Korva. No having feelings about how you weren't good enough in front of the very powerful wizards who breezed through every academic challenge they ever ran into.

"Look, guys. I am in favor of restoring the existing academy libraries, formally opening them to the public, and cycling out their old books for better ones over time. Cataloging every book sounds like a great project for a country where people can reliably buy bread." And one where everyone has trusted their ability to write things without dying for it for longer than two months, but that's a different argument.

"For the moment, I expect that most of the existing libraries haven't been burnt. We have them, we just need to tell the librarians that we plan to stop crippling them, and let them improve with time."

"But a library is not a school, and they won't do us much good if the vast majority of people can't read. With reading skills, perhaps we can replace a lot of schooling with access to books, but they need the skill in the first place for the books to do any good. It's worth having a school system for that, and that school system shouldn't just be a sieve for people who don't need one in the first place."

Thea mentally runs back through the statements of everyone so far and tries to count them up to make sure the vote will be in favor for what she is about to propose.

“On that topic… Should we have a vote then for: ‘Schools that at minimum teach basic reading skills’?  Not saying that they will or won’t do more, but to establish there is a consensus for that much?”

"I'm not voting for anything of the sort unless we pass a rule saying they can't force anyone to stay there." And probably not even then.

She doesn't take the time to mentally tally, but has the felt sense that that's a coin flip in this room, as it stands.

"Agreed, I think the proposal is a little too vague. Honestly, I would also prefer to talk more about economic feasibility first. Delegate Rado has made some good points about the costs of what we had. If anyone feels that cost is a sticking point, I want to figure out what we can offer before we decide what we should."

Quintana gets a smile.

"Before we break, then. Rado, what times of year is a child's labor least valuable to his parents, and is it the same as when his parents have the least work to do themselves?"

“There’s no such thing as a good time for it. After the harvest and into winter is I suppose probably the least work, but that’s when much of the weaving is done and if the children aren’t there to learn that it’ll still cost far more than not learning their letters. After that, perhaps late spring after the planting? But if you’re imagining some time where children have little to do, it doesn’t exist.”

"On another note, something I would like to do, before our next meeting, is meet with a priest of Abadar about a few things: what expenses Cheliax will actually be able to afford in the long run, which I suspect we are estimating badly on account of the currency crisis, and also whether there exist means by which the schools might be made to pay for themselves. Is there anyone who would want to be a part of that?"

“I’ll do it, I have some notion of accounting and the prices of books from my smuggling operation.”

"I would find such Information a Useful Addition to my Draft Proposals."