"I was pretty much home schooled last two seasons. Don't really remember if that'd been a problem when I was little but I think one year olds don't get a lot to review..."

"Yes, I was thinking once there were more serious academics. Why were you homeschooled?"

"I couldn't sit still in pre-school and kept getting in a lot of trouble for it. Mom said she could teach me better herself."

"Huh."

"Mom taught at a women's college though so she'd have me in her lectures with a thing to do, which was really fun."

"A women's college?"

"Most human colleges and universities are for men or women, not both, currently."

"Huh, why's that?"

"Humans have gendered discrimination, and women used to very rarely have access to higher education. Men's colleges often still don't want to admit them, so women's colleges were founded."

"Huh. I suppose that makes a sort of circuitous sense."

"Discrimination on that axis is getting better, at least."

"There's not an underlying basis to it?"

"I think humans are more sexually dimorphic than Amentans but not very. The basis is probably mostly historic divisions of labor during the transition from foraging into agriculture. Opinions do differ among those advancing women's rights on if human women are the same as human men intellectually, or if they have a complimentary intelligence, though the latter theory doesn't tend to account for cultural differences in how women are expected to act."

"It's funny, because of course we have castes, but with castes we can expect that over the years we've really all been bred to what we're specialized in - it would be so much more complicated biologically to accomplish the same thing without very obvious sexual dimorphism, but some animals do have enough to cover a distinction like that. But if both of the sexes can talk read and add, there doesn't seem much gain in having all the other adaptations for intelligence fall off like they're vestigial in half the species. It'd make it hard to assortatively mate, for one thing - I suppose the men could aggressively vet prospective fathers-in-law?"

"Some cultures had the parents or grandparents arrange marriages, traditionally, or at least recommend them - though whether the mother or father is the one doing the arranging varies, and arranged marriages have long since fallen out of fashion in the culture I was focusing on. I suspect the main difference relevant to the colleges was that when literacy was low but becoming important to class mobility, many families only had enough resources to educate a small portion of their children, and girls were in middle class families supposed to manage inward, household affairs, so it made sense to, if they were going to teach anyone to read, teach the boys. And a girl who can't read is hardly suitable for higher education."

"Women's colleges weren't exceptionally far behind universal education becoming popular."

"There's ever been such a thing as arranged marriage on Amenta, I don't know if anyone's really practicing it today besides in the making-suggestions fashion."

"Humans have a few regions where it's still practiced, but it's rare."

"I think it fell out of favor in blues around the time dating sites were invented and was already unfashionable in the other castes by then."

"Dating sites?"

"Websites where people can put in information about themselves, search for what they're looking for in a partner, and chat with people on the basis of their profiles."

"That seems odd but I might be too used to a less. Internet. Society."

"It was considered odd at the time too! It's fairly pedestrian now."

"Cultural changes tend to do that."

And they are back at the guest house. "Bright Sorrow, when did you want someone to walk you through the math quizzes?"

"This afternoon or tomorrow maybe? In case I have some studying to do, it's good to do it early."