"Dad said Sasuke's trying to fix stuff. I'm going to fix things in the Leaf so he doesn't have to worry about them, though."

"That's good! Decentralize the fixing-stuff energy. What's on your to-do list?"

"Lots, though a big chunk of it's 'figure out what's even wrong' since I'm kind of in the middle of things but also spent the last few years out of the village and was a kid last time I was there? International relations really aren't done well, though, nor are incentives for clients to describe their missions right, and the promotion system is dumb, and also dad said something about the Uchiha Massacre being caused by a teammate of the Third, and clearly there's some kind of deep clusterfuck there? Like having laws that apply unevenly to different clans probably started a lot of that... Also the Hyuuga clan has main families and branch families and the main families have the branch families enslaved, which is part of the way that the laws are twisty and messed up, and I'd need to do a combination of like trying to change social norms and untwisting the laws to really solve that?"

"Wow, you've got your work cut out for you there, that's a mess."

"Yeah, it really is."

"I'm kind of curious if there's stuff that's obviously wrong to you? That maybe I haven't noticed?"

"I don't have a great sense of what things are actually widely approved of versus what things merely have not been eradicated despite all civilized people believing they are a problem but the thing that is most obvious to me as a member of the first category is the child soldier thing."

" - The child soldier thing?"

"You're like fifteen and you've been running potentially life-threatening missions for how long now?"

"Three years?"

"Since you were twelve! I mean, I'm one to talk, but I didn't start doing life-threatening shit besides, like, driving a car, till I was seventeen! Also it was my own idea and not an institutionalized expectation!"

" - Twelve's kind of - normal, and people don't really start later? We were always hearing about how if we did better we could graduate earlier? But - what's the normal age, to do missions and stuff where you're from, then?"

"I don't object to teaching kids how to do cool magic chakra stuff, if it's important for making sure they don't have relevant atrophy, or whatever, but where I'm from people are in school usually till they're like, 22, sometimes longer - the age has been creeping up, used to be more like eighteen by default and 22 if you were particularly academic. Also life then proceeds not to revolve around anything I'd call 'missions', by and large."

"What do you even learn for that long?"

"Math and science and literature and history and civics and gym and music and art and then you start specializing! You know what's fun? Econ is fun."

"We do need to add history classes to the Academy, yeah, right now we pretty much just don't talk about stuff. And I graduated not knowing much about other nations... I don't know that's a whole ten years? And - why's it important?"

(He can kind of see the shape that it is important, but - not the details.)

"I think it's plausible that there's a few things going on that make you get along well with less school - one, I'm seeing some evidence that futzing with chakra all the time might make you better at processing and retaining information, so you might learn faster than baseline humans who don't do any of that, and two, your society is lower-tech and less connected, so there's less you need to know to not look like a dumbass on the internet since you don't have an internet and if you did it probably wouldn't have too many foreigners on it. Arguably, a lot of what those years cover isn't essential. People don't, like, die because they slept through Lusofone Theater 2050-Present, or anything. People don't fail to get a job because they mix up Trotsky and Lenin unless they're trying to get a job as a Russian history professor. I'd almost say the ballooning educational expectations are downstream of a healthier society - less conflict, fewer resources sunk into conflict - I'd attribute it to post-scarcity economics but this trend was already evident before that! - and what people do with that flexibility is they keep their kids safe and teach them lots of enriching stuff."

"I was also always kind of miserable in school. But I think we could maybe manage things different?"

"And we've been kinda at peace my whole life, so - if I made things more peaceful, got demilitarization going properly, it'd make sense to push back when people can go on dangerous missions, maybe fill in the stuff before that with something other than school unless people like school?"

"And what do you mean by 'institutionalized expectation?'"

"Suppose that you aged, I don't know, eight, decided you did not want to be a ninja when you grew up and instead preferred to go into bicycle repair, would that have been feasible? - I don't actually know if you have bicycles."

"I wasn't a clan kid, so I had to apply to the Academy, but it was how I was gonna get out of the orphanage and get a future worth anything, which's another thing to fix. I think clan kids having to be shinobi is mostly their families, less the government? Especially since not even everyone in all clans is a registered shinobi?"

"Institutionalized doesn't strictly mean the government, but maybe it's not as big a problem as I thought and it's all running on 'wow, I wanna be a ninja like all my surviving relatives'."

"I mean if all the adults around you really want you to do something it's hard to not as a kid? Plus some clans have that much control of members. And most people, especially who aren't in clans, can get emancipated once they enter the Academy, if you don't like where you are, but if you don't you gotta wait until you find an apprenticeship somewhere else."

"I'm not sure where exactly I'd start at picking all that apart but it doesn't sound like a good stable end state to my mind."

"My general idea had been fixing children's rights so you don't have to be a shinobi to get all the stuff you need. Make it easier for people in clans to get emancipated, and reduce how much control clans have over their own people - doing that without making the Hokage more of a military dictator would be hard though. And maybe teaching way more people to use chakra peacefully would help, and kind of in general make - being a shinobi less special? And maybe make it easier for people to go from the Academy into a civilian apprenticeship, if they decide they don't wanna be a shinobi."

"All those things sound good. - has this planet invented democracy? It's not as great as its loudest proponents would have you believe but it has some advantages."

"I'm not sure? I think maybe the First Hokage was elected democratically by the clans? That got mentioned once."