In a manner like unto an Undead Abomination sits Lluïsa. She doesn't look okay! But stoically.

Ysabet is here. 

She’s surprised Korva didn’t cancel.  The floor ran long and isn’t Korva on multiple other committees?  Thea isn’t complaining, she’s sure Korva can handle it if she decided not to cancel.

She gives a nod of reassurance at Korva, she bets Korva can thread the needle and find a compromise that doesn’t leave the country illiterate.

She's here. And also quietly judging everyone who is flagging, anyone who tries should be able to keep functioning all day.

If Lluïsa were reading minds she'd be tempted to duel the Hellknight washout or whatever she is, then we'd see who's "flagging". (It would not be flirting.)

Thea has plenty of physical endurance and even endurance at focused mental activity, but the convention requires constant awareness of tricks and angles and possible speeches.

Coeliaris is here, and is correcting tests while she waits for the meeting to start.

He's here. It feels a bit surreal; so much has happened since the last time he attended a committee meeting.

Present.

"Hello everyone. It's been a long day, so I doubt we'll get through everything I wanted to talk about, but I'm going to ask some of you for homework, so we should at least try to get through that much. First of all, as a procedural matter, I'd like to formally vote on whether we want to keep the convention secretaries here to take notes to distribute to everyone else, or whether we'd like to expel the secretaries and speak privately. I don't know anyone else to have expelled theirs, so I'd lean against expelling them, but I think it's worth making an explicit decision about it, now that we know we can."

She'll first ask them to raise their hands if they want to keep the secretaries, and then raise their hands if they want to remove them.

She doesn't care either way. Abstain.

Keep. If anyone wants real secrecy they'll have to go to much more effort than having conversations here, and half-secrecy is merely an annoyance.

Keep.

Keep.  She’d rather an accurate account available to everyone than partial accounts which will leak anyway.

He arrives just as Korva starts speaking, and raises his hand in favor of keeping the secretaries.

Definitely keep. This- among other reasons- is why she has an apprentice. 

She thinks about it. Is she going to say anything here she would rather not be repeated to the floor? Does she expect that to change? 

Well. In a sense it limits what arguments she can make, because she cannot argue against spending on education in a way that will make enemies of people she needs to instead have onside for fixing the army. But it would be foolish to do that anyway, in a room with 11 other people in it, and she’s not good enough at politics for dancing around the edges of a line to be a good strategy in expectation.

In favor.

Keep 'em.

She reminds everyone that her own notes are freely available to fellow Committee members, but votes for keeping the official scribes too.

It’s a good sign to Thea that Lluisa found the assurance that the convention is private (for the purposes of the censorship law) convincing enough to offer copies of her own notes!

"All right, passes. Second of all - Professor Coeliaris, I'd like to apologize for trying to shoot down your bill on the floor today. I don't actually think it's a bad idea. I do think that it assumes a school system that we don't presently have, and that if our resources for that school system are very limited, we should figure out what they are and what we most need before committing to implement any specific thing. But - I would much rather have those discussions between committees than on the floor in front of everyone, especially with the new prohibition on introducing the same bill twice."

"Madam, think nothing of it. Likewise, I apologize if, in my zeal for the Cause, you felt excluded. And I certainly agree that if we can get any kind of educational system at all out of the mess our predecessor institutions left us, it will be quite a victory. However, you're mistaken if you think there is no school system running at all. Many of the younger children are not being taught by past extant institutions, but my colleagues and I are certainly attempting to run the Westcrown College of Wizardry."

"I do understand that the academies are open. It's possible that there's a place solely within the academies for tracking. I suspect that once education is voluntary the academies won't see very many people who are interested in taking on large amounts of debt to learn only basic wizardry, and in the old system this was - well, in theory you can have a system where children graduate from wizard prep and don't get at all penalized for not going on to an academy. Many of those will already have enough wizardry skills for another profession, and - that's the sort of thing that will inform how the academies are structured going forward, too."

"On the subject of the academies - this morning we passed a censorship law, among other things providing for the future possibility of a censorship board and current protections for libraries run by the crown. This makes all of the library stuff we were considering last time suddenly much more important. Cheliax doesn't have anyone qualified to run a censorship board at present, but the people who still work for the government and have the most relevant skills are quite possibly the academy librarians. I don't know exactly what sorts of proposals we should be considering for using libraries and existing library staff as a means of curating or approving works of particular academic value, or of expanding access to such works in cities that don't have an academy, or of ensuring that the academy libraries are open to a larger portion of the public than just students, but I think all of that is at least worth thinking about. Delegates Oriol and Coeliaris, and obviously anyone else who's decided that this matters to you, if you could think about it and come back to us later with some ideas worth considering, I would be grateful."

"I shall. I have also a Professional Librarian in my Employ to consult with, though it is an Outsider and may not necessarily be able to Opine on Material Libraries."

"How splendid! Which species of outsider, might I ask? Your own work?"

Nod. "A Harbinger Archon of Heaven. I have a Useful Spell known among Lawyers making the Calling easier for Legal Work. Though I shall not hold up this Committee discussing it."

Lots of people have outsiders working for them. Obviously she's not going to volunteer any information about hers.

"That sounds like a fantastic resource, thank you." She is so tempted to try to figure out how to talk to an archon. This is not actually relevant. "Last request, then. Archduke Blanxart, you mentioned that the convention was currently the third largest expense to the crown, behind the orphanages and the military, is that correct?"

Eumenes was unimpressive, but maybe a Harbinger Archon can describe its training better.  She can see if she can get the chance to talk.  Also, if the ‘useful spell’ Lluisa mentioned is lower circle or is otherwise better than lesser planar ally, that positively affects one of her proposals for Forms of the Convention.

"The President clarified that he considers the convention a personal expense rather than a Crown one, although in practice the vast majority of current Crown revenue comes from the Cotonnets anyway—that's not officially a state secret, by the way, but if the Queen is displeased to see it mocked in the pamphlets tomorrow she'll know whom to blame—as far as the magnitude of the expense, though, I don't know of any others larger. The wizard academies are officially self-funding, though most students repay their debt in the army."

"Sounds like we could save a lot of money by shutting them all down. We don't need more soldiers for the Worldwound, if we ask them to repay their debts in the army we're just lighting money on fire."

“Scaling back the army sounds like a good idea to save money for better causes like ensuring basic literacy, but there is a committee focused on the army, so we would need that committee to agree.  At least, I think them agreeing and being the ones to propose it are much better for the chances of it passing the floor.  And wizardry is still a decently paying profession even without the army, scaling back army wizardry would reduce the demand for wizards, but not enough to shut down the wizard academies entirely I think?”

Thea is wishing she was better at sums and numbers… she’s going to raise it in priority for subjects to learn.

"I don't see why we need literacy or soldiers. Soldiers are worse than bandits, at least when a bandit steals from you the baron might do something about it."

"Isn't the Worldwound closed now, anyway?"

Emphatic nodding!

"I don't think it's our job to recommend that Cheliax stop having an army, although if it's relevant to the question of funding we can certainly ask those on the army committee where it's going. But I do think the scope of our job depends enormously on how much money we have to work with, where it's going, and if possible any estimates of how much money an educated populace makes for Cheliax. I was hoping, Archduke, that even if you don't have numbers now, you might have some idea where to get them, so we could look?"

"Wizard academy enrollments are, as a matter of fact, down significantly from before the war, as we no longer force anyone to attend. Those who do attend pay tuition to do so. The only way to save money on wizards at the moment, I think, is to pay fewer of them, or pay them less, to defend the world from the demons that continue to occupy the ruins of Sarkoris. Whether or not that may be called a good idea, it is, I think, not in the remit of this committee."

"I do have a summary of current Crown expenditures and revenues here, though these should be taken with the caveat that, by this time next year certainly, we ought to have our ordinary tax revenues again, but possibly much less archmage charity."

"It's also not the case that Cheliax can do without an army even if we abandon the wound, certainly far less than it can do without schools. If we don't have schools, in a decade we will have wasted fewer children's time. If we don't have an army, in a decade Cheliax will be reduced to those parts of it the archmages personally defend; our army as it stands is a poor one, and the army committee is working to see it improved, but it is foolish to go without in times of peace and madness to do so when the convention has declared its intention to reconquer the empire."

“How essential are the army wizards?  How much worse would the army perform if it had to cut back on wizard support?”

"The extent to which wizards are helpful is, I think, wildly overstated. A wizard before third circle is less valuable than a skilled soldier, and the main reason they're kept around is because the Chelish army did  not know how to inspire loyalty and tried to make do with detect thoughts. It would be painful to do without them entirely but I expect we could do with significantly fewer, especially once the mop up at the wound finishes and Endure Elements becomes less valuable."

"So we can close down the schools without messing up the army at all."

Why does Lluïsa's response to a stressful day include finding that illiterate tin can attractive. You're a grown adult, you idiot.

"I see no Financial Reason why an absurd Abandonment of General Literacy would have bearing in either Direction on Military Expenditure, the Wizard Academies fed by it Aside. Archduke Blanxart, I would look over those figures, if you please."

Korva is reviewing the numbers. Around ten million for the army, whatever, the army is the backbone of the machine that they crush up all the children in service to, of course it costs unfathomable amounts of money.

Nearly six million gold for the orphanages. Starving, no longer offering daycare services, a third of the staff paid a quarter as much, limping along with goats instead of orcs, and -

" - I'm sorry," she says, a little more quietly than before, "Are you telling me that after halving expenses, the orphanages still cost more than half as much as the Chelish Army, which bore more than half the weight of saving the world for more than fifty years?"

Thea thinks wizards are really handy and was hoping to make a point there, but apparently Dolor has already thought of it and disagrees.  Well there is still a point to be made…

To Dolor: “Where do you think third circle wizards come from?  If you cut the supply of first circle wizards that eventually cuts your number of third circles.”

To Lluisa: ”And the relevance to this committee is that first circle wizards come from smarter children who were identified as such in the school system.”

And circling the conversation back around to Korva. “Would the opening of schools alleviate some of the labor of orphanages?”

"I am not a wizard, but my understanding is that first and second circle wizards at the wound gain power more slowly than if they had been adventuring instead."

"Adventuring is by far the Best and at some point the Only means of improving in Wizardry and also the Deadliest, exceeding even Soldiering, and I am not aware of the Magnitude of the Differences, which perhaps an Abadaran might know."

"Are similar Documents to these available for Earlier Years, for Comparison? Years when the Schools were in Operation? I do not see the Cost of Literacy."

"If true, that only means that the value of a wizard's education is likely to go up in the future."

"Schooling has as I understand by far the greatest Efficiency as measured in Circles of Wizardry per Slain Corpse, and it is for this reason that the Wizard Schools of the Empire are to be Prized," agrees Lluïsa.

She had not really previously understood the extent to which men abandoning their children were not just inflicting enormous costs on the women and children they abandon, but enormous costs on the state.

You could get the army people on board with figuring out how to make fathers parent their children, with numbers like that.

"....bringing back mandatory primary schools would make the orphanage problems worse," says Korva, even though it's completely against her immediate goals here, because it's - true. "At present the orphanages are no longer operating as free childcare for women who work, meaning that children who have a mother but not a father are largely being cared for by older children who are out of school. Probably the effect of voluntary schools there would be fairly negligible, since a child who can't be spared just won't go."

"According to these numbers, we're dealing with a national financial crisis in large part due to lack of childcare. Possibly this is more a concern for the Family committee than for this one, but - it's certainly adjacent to our problem, and worth knowing about. May I keep these numbers, Archduke?"

Well that’s disappointing.  Korva didn’t try to spin that fact either… does she think she can win anyway?  Or maybe she’s trying to win an argument over on the family committee?

"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."

Ysabet is honestly pretty tempted to quit the committee now that it turns out they don't have enough money for the schools, but if she does that the ridiculous people who want schools might find a way to bring them back.

"Like you said, it's pretty late. I say we figure that out tomorrow."

Dolor is perfectly ready to continue discussing this for another four hours if needed! ...It strikes her though, that that doesn't actually advance any of her goals.

"Returning to this tomorrow seems sensible."

"You want me to talk to some postal people about this?"

"Yes, actually, that would be awesome. I'd like more idea of how common they are, how they're generally constructed, how they're staffed - pretty much what kind of existing structure we'd be working with if we have them additional responsibilities. And anything else you think we'd need to make it feasible, you're the expert there."

"I'll write something up, talk to the stationary postals in town."

Thumbs up.

Aaaand if nobody's got anything else, they can wrap for now.