"I don't need that particular copy back. As I said before, the budget does concern sensitive matters of state and it oughtn't be quoted in the pamphlets tomorrow, which is the main reason I haven't contemplated offering all the delegates a copy. I'll arrange for them to be distributed to the committee chairs, though."

"It seems to me, right now, though it pains me to say, that we simply don't have the money for a public school system, which would certainly cost as much as the orphanages and most likely more. If, in a few years, we have enough actual tax revenue to pay our ordinary expenses, and the Good churches are more established, and the charity of the archmages is no longer being spent on the basic functioning of the state, we might attempt them. I have hope, actually, that if Naima Cotonnet did not have to spend her incomprehensible sums of money on paying our army she might want to pay for our children to learn to read, but it is hardly the place of this committee to command her to do so."

Education isn't worth the money but if the army is being funded anyway she supposes she doesn't have any reason to object to the archmage wasting her coin. It's hardly as though you can prevent a noble from spending their fortune wastefully.

No public schools means some parents might be interested in paying for privately run schools or at least part time lessons.  She’s not sure she’s that competent at teaching, but hearing what a disaster the Asmodean schools were she’s sure she can at least do better than that.

She doesn't really care why they agree not to have schools as long as they agree not to have schools.

Ugh.

"A voluntary school system won't cost very much at first, because many children won't attend. But if we promise it to everyone who wants to come, and the schools are good after a while, we'll have dug ourselves a hole. It's possible that we can do something clever by moving excess wizards from the military to teaching, to pay off their debts, but they'll still have to eat."

"I think for the moment I may have to agree with the Archduke, at least as far as the kind of comprehensive public school system we're used to goes, unless we can find a way to lighten the load of our other two major expenses. In which case... we should be thinking about the lightest, smallest programs that might maintain mass literacy. Right now, almost anyone can teach the skill, so it's cheap. In a generation of no schools, it won't be, and we lose the ability to - read the laws, read holy books, read letters, read anything else. But most people learn to read early, it's not as if it actually takes ten years of schooling to attain it."

"I never Learned to Read," says Lluïsa with what would be misleadingly unfortunate phrasing if she weren't so obviously an ink-swathed attorney at law. "And so I have no Recollection of the Methods of Teaching that Skill from my School Days. What then is the Crux of Teaching it?"

"Sound it out." Or so her mother said; by the time Korva started school, she knew the letters, and only had to learn more words. "Learn the sounds the letters make, and figure out what words they're spelling. The basics are simple. It's fluency and - vocabulary, I think, that take the bulk of the time. But most of that isn't taught at all, it's just practice."

... anyone can do it, really. Scale your expectations down to just literacy, and expect that anything else can be taught by the books, and doesn't take a wizard, it just takes -

"Maybe we're thinking of this wrong. My mother taught me half of how to read before I even started school, and she wasn't a teacher or anything, she was just a clerk somewhere. If there's useful material to be read, you don't need make people learn. And if you're just doing reading, you don't need specialists, you just need someone literate, and - books. Maybe a book to explain teaching, for anyone who isn't confident in it. But -

"How much would it cost to give every village access to a library, instead of a school? Not a big one, just - reading primers, textbooks that cover everything else, histories, holy texts, the legal code - maybe some fiction curated to play to people's actual interests - if they're sharing you don't need one for every child, right -"

"I will point out I suggested this last session. But not a lot, if we can do the books in debossed unbound pages, using fabricate, which I suspect is possible. We'd then ask the village to fill in the debossed letters with charcoal, and perhaps punch and sew the pages together, if they're feeling ambitious." 

She remembers Coeliaris suggesting giving everyone copies of a single book that was half pictures, on the theory that people could pick up literacy without any outside help at all.

...but it's not very gracious to say so.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have dismissed it out of hand. I think we want a very different implementation - when I say I already knew half of how to read when I started school, I mean that my mother spent an hour a day teaching me for more than a year, not that I picked it up without help. But two or three years of that is still much less investment than ten years of full-time school. 

I don't think we want to give everyone copies of the same book. I think a lot of people can probably use the same ones, if they're visiting the library at different times. Then you can do other books about other stuff, too. I - think we probably should not expect villagers to assemble the books themselves, I don't see that the labor is likely to be cheaper there than in the cities, and I worry the books will sit unused if they don't understand how to finish constructing them."

"Copying books the usual way has never been cheaper. You could set the academy students to copying them for free, and could probably get quite a lot of underemployed half-wizards to do it for a pittance. The larger expense is the paper. And, of course, determining who should be responsible for safeguarding the books once you send them.”

"Twenty million in Cheliax. If every town of a thousand has a library of a hundred books, that's still millions and millions in gold, and they'd need to be replaced every time the books wear out or get destroyed, which they often will if you're making low quality books and expecting children to read out of them. I don't expect this would work to teach children reading, but even if it did it's hardly a cheap solution."

"As I understand it the Inputs for a Program of Libraries are as follows:

• the Cost of Physical Space, a one-time Expenditure, only high in the Cities;
• the Cost of a Staff, which need not be Ruinous; name a Chief Librarian in each and set him a small Budget for Minor Staff;
• the Cost of a Board or Commission to determine those Titles with which to Fill the Shelves; small as a Government Body goes;
• as regards the Cost of Books:
• the Cost of Authorship, a one-time Expenditure, unless Replaced as the Board of Libraries shall Direct;
• the Cost of Paper, perhaps High but as I understand the Fabricator Archmage may fabricate paper and the cost may Sharply Drop;
• the Cost of Ink, which perhaps may run High? may it be also fabricated? I am Unsure; nevertheless;
• the Cost of Wizardry to Scribe, which may be done Inexpensively by a Laundry-Wizard of which there are many, it is a Simple Spell;
• the Cost of Binding which I do not know, Delegate Coeliaris suggests Doing Without;
• and lastly the Cost of Logistics to move the Right Books to the Right Libraries.

Have I the right of it, or is aught left Unmentioned?"

"I don't think twenty million is right, though the point about low quality books wearing out is a good one. A hundred-page book is, what, one gold piece? Less, these days, with the metal crisis? At a hundred books for a village of a thousand, that's a silver per person. And a lot of books already exist and may not be distributed well; it's possible that we can buy old ones for much cheaper, and that communities can add their own over time. Maybe we don't start with a hundred this year. Maybe we spread it out over time, and add more as needed."

"I think the list is right, though I don't know if we need staff. Needing dedicated staff seems like it sort of defeats the purpose of not having them be schools, but maybe you can assign someone with another primary job to also be in charge of the books?"

"Post offices, maybe, though little villages don't have dedicated ones."

"I confess, I very much doubt you'll produce enough genuinely educated students this way to feed the academies. Literacy is the very beginning of education, not the end, and many essential skills can't be learned effectively without quite a lot of instruction."

Well, there's cost of enforcement to keep people from walking off with the books for resale to the government again, but that would hardly be honest to put on the library; if the thieves weren't stealing books they'd be stealing something else and you'd still have to catch them.

"I expect that is correct; there may be more things a library could spend money on, but I think none it has to. As for the population... I have heard the number said, but I cannot guarantee it's accuracy myself."

"I am concerned Chiefly that there be a Guardian of the Books entrusted with their Keeping; a Postmaster guards well Letters already and with some small Expansion of the Postal Budget not Ruinous to the State would likely guard well Books."

Nod to Imperia, but Lluïsa doesn't really have an idea. She just coasted into the top of the wizard class, personally.

"Well, excise all violence from the hearts of men and replace it with the desire to parent their children, and we'll have plenty of money to hire teachers again.

For now... maybe we can swing restarting some of the wizard prep schools as voluntary general middle schools, open to kids who can pass a basic exam, and provide a pathway for rural kids to enter the professions if they have a knack for it and have learned what they can from the libraries. Or maybe they can charge tuition to most kids and let the brightest ones in for free. The academies are going to get smaller either way, just because we're not forcing anyone to attend, and nobody can or should budge on that."

"Expanding the post offices sounds - plausible. How far apart are they, right now?"

"Hear hear."

"It would be an interesting research project to determine what modifications to detect thoughts would be needed to determine childhood cognitive potential. Not something we'd have any time soon."

"I think you can probably do perfectly well with written exams... unless, I suppose, they're implemented in such a way that there's rampant cheating. We'll need to run the math on whether middle schools are even feasible. The old wizard track took maybe five percent of kids, half of whom flunked out in short order. - if we do implement middle schools I think we should be firm that there's no penalty for failing out, in addition to being firm that no one has to attend them."

Basic wizardry is not that hard, 25‰ seems really low. Were the schools just that bad?

"Anyway. Uh... all the other ideas I prepared are worthless if we have no money to pay for them. If anyone else has ideas they want to discuss, let's do it now. If not, it's late, and maybe we should hash out the specifics of a potential library system tomorrow."

Well this was a let down.  Thea doesn’t have any ideas, and she doesn’t have the financial acumen (or really any math skills past basic addition and subtraction) to deal with the main constraint of money.  She’ll look through her own library for ideas on what books to recommend in case the library system needs a shortlist of books to prioritize.

“That sounds like a reasonable plan.  For tomorrow… are we… coming up with book recommendations?  Ideas for producing and distributing books?  Rules for handling library lending?”

"Whatever you want. I'm thinking we come up with a list of subjects that a valid library has to contain books covering, first off, mostly without tying it to any specific book list. Ultimately we need to come up with the text of a law providing for post offices to function as libraries."