"Maybe! I was awake a lot at weird times as a kid."

"Training?" asks Cam blandly.

"And running around and exploring the forest and working on forts and painting stuff... I once painted this entire giant monument overnight! Though I had to spend the whole rest of the day scrubbing the paint off."

"Oh, actual childhood activities!"

"Yeah! Lots of people thought I was way too undisciplined though..."

"Ooooof course they did."

"I honestly probably would've done pretty well with no school and being thrown lots of different cool stuff to look at? And - when I'm fixing the education system and making compulsory education a thing, I don't want to make it worse for kids like me? I'd like to try to bake support into the system."

"Lemme make a note to find you stuff about that, there's been work done in the space and not all of it is 'put the kids on drugs', a lot of it is 'fidget toys and recess' type stuff."

"Neat! Yeah that'd be nice. I might also try stuff maybe you guys haven't done, like more personalized education? We already have a set-up for teaching people in small groups after twelve, we could probably sort like all the Naruto-types into one group and all the book-types into another group at that point and not have to change our structure a lot."

"Oh, yeah, the results on small class sizes and competent matching of styles between students and teachers for rapport are great, mostly the pushback against that is that it's expensive."

"If we're not doing the child labor thing with the small groups it'll be probably harder to afford, yeah, though changing who's teaching from jounin who get paid a lot to chuunin who get paid less would be helpful for that, or to people who're education specialists and not like combat specialists."

"How do you even afford the current education system? Being indefensible doesn't make child-soldier-training cheap."

"Newly graduated genin with enough potential are put into three man squads and then the squad is offered to a jounin. About a third of jounin actually take on a squad. The two thirds who aren't picked, and all the genin who weren't thought to have a ton of potential, don't actually get the same level of personalized attention? They're put into eight man squads with a chuunin. The three man squads do take on missions but are subsidized by the state pretty much. You're supposed to move to chuunin and being independently bringing in a lot of money within two years. Part of the problem right now though is that the low-ranked missions that new genin are put on are also the ones clients lie about the most. So you'll have a team who think they're escorting merchants through friendly territory to scare off bandits, but actually the lead merchant has powerful shinobi being sent after him. And the merchant didn't tell the village because he wanted to save money. So if everything goes well, the kids get some practice, but if the merchant lied you need someone powerful there to make sure the kids get out alive."

"Also a lot of jounin will take a pay cut for easier, less dangerous missions with more regular pay."

"Huh. That's... an interesting system, I'm not sure I can retrodict how it evolved that way - how are the squads assembled, how is it decided which jounin get offered which..."

"Honestly I think mostly politics. Some compatibility, but."

"Okay, but what kind of politics?"

He thinks for a bit.

"So our graduating class had three teams accepted - we were coming off a war so were a pretty small class. Two of the teams had at least one clan heir on them. One of the teams had a Yamanaka, an Akimichi, and a Nara, and those're allied clans who usually get paired together, and all of them were the kids of their clan heads, so they got assigned the Hokage's son as a teacher. The other team also had a clan heir and was assigned a really promising up-and-coming jounin, I think whose father knew one of the kids' parents?"

"My team passed by impressing our teacher, though - we were two orphans and a girl with no particular connections. We were kind of the three kids who they couldn't make work on any other team I think?"

"How'd you impress them? - Where's your third teammate now?"

"Our third teammate's Sakura. She's apprenticing with Granny Tsunade to learn medical techniques."

"Kakashi-sensei told us he had these two bells, and we had to get the bells to pass - and it was one bell per person so he'd pass only two of us at most, and whoever didn't get a bell didn't get lunch, after he'd told us not to eat breakfast. It was actually to test our teamwork and if we were willing to sacrifice ourselves for the team's good. We really failed at that, but he gave us a second chance, which was actually secretly another test. I'd cheated and tried to steal the lunches, so he tied me to a post. Sakura and Sasuke would get lunch, and I wouldn't. Sasuke waited until Kakashi-sensei was out of sight and then offered me his lunch, and Sakura then followed Sasuke. Kakashi-sensei said that was enough teamwork to pass."

"...is that an orthodox filtration method?"

"No idea?"

"I don't have a specific problem with it but it does seem weird."

"Twelve year olds usually aren't actually good at that type of thing? And also if a new genin immediately tries to sacrifice themselves something's probably horribly wrong?"

"I mean, sacrificing your career advancement is different from sacrificing your life, but in general I have mixed feelings about tests of unspecified qualities evaluated as a one-off without, like, intertest reliability checks."

"Yeah. He did also kind of make it explicitly about being willing to risk even our lives, but... You can't get much about people from that short an interaction."