"They could do your homework."

"I don't want anybody to do my homework. That's cheating."

"It's not wrong to cheat at school."

"Is so."

"No it's not. It's like how it's wrong to shoot people but it's not wrong to...shoot Nazis if you're in the Polish Resistance. Whether you have to follow an institution's rules depends on whether it's legitimate. And school isn't."

"In what sense is school not legitimate?"

"Well, it's like jail except you don't get sent there for doing something wrong, you get sent there even if you did nothing wrong."

"It's not like jail. Jail's a punishment. School's not a punishment, it's there because kids have to learn stuff like reading and math and civics if they want to participate in democracy and in society in general."

"It's exactly like jail. You have to be there and you get punished if you leave and you get punished if you don't obey and they don't care whether you want to participate in democracy and society in general."

"Well most kids can't run away to fairyland, so it's not like they have a lot of better options."

"And no one tries giving them any, even the ones who are clearly being made miserable by school."

"I think the thing that really confuses me about this is that like - your parents kicked you out of your house and told you to obey me, and you don't think me or your parents are awful, and you don't even seem to think it'd be horrible if I hit you or made you sleep out on the porch exposed to the elements even though it's gonna be winter soon, but when school leaves you stuck a place and punishes you if you don't obey, that's torture."

"You did something for me! It's fair. School has done nothing for me and still gets to treat me like I'm in its debt."

"I guess. But school isn't actually trying to get anything out of you, it's trying to help you be more equipped to deal with the world. Like - you obey your parents, right?"

"Yes."

"Well, why's that more legitimate than school?"

"I'm in their debt. Because they created me."

"So does it not matter to you that school is a part of the government, and the government, like, keeps everyone from being killed in wars, and keeps up the roads and libraries, and investigates murders, and makes sure that people don't starve to death in the streets, and is only able to do any of that because its citizens all have something resembling a basic education, and so in order to maintain this state of affairs it requires that everybody learn stuff?"

"Fairies don't have wars or murders. And people could just maintain their own roads, and libraries would be easy to have exist since people'd bring you things to trade for the books. So yes, I object to someone doing a lot of stuff that doesn't need doing and then saying that to keep doing it they need me to be shaped a certain way so they'll throw me in a box and punish me for years and years and years of my life without even checking whether they really need me shaped that way or whether there's any other way to do it."

"Well, that's great for fairies, I'm sorry your stupid fairy dad dragged you to this stupid world full of a bunch of stuff you don't need, but humans without militaries get conquered unless someone else is policing the world for them, and humans murder each other, and I don't think they really succeed at maintaining roads over long distances on their own, and they invented libraries because lots and lots of people don't have anything to trade for books and we wanted them to have books anyway, and maybe fairies can do better, because that doesn't sound hard if you don't die and you don't need to eat, but it's not humans' fault that the best we can do doesn't work for you, it's your dad's fault for bringing you here and then refusing to find a way to homeschool you."

"School is just as bad for you as it is for me. And even if you consider yourself so indebted to the government they're entitled to torture you for twelve years, only offering people one way to repay you makes you a jerk, and doing it to them for years on end when it's obviously hurting them makes you a jerk, and pretending it's anything other than slavery is just - manipulative."

"Repayment isn't the point, the point is making sure I'm minimally equipped to interact with society and make money and vote for reasonable people. And the government gets to decide how to do that, because the government is the one running the show, that's just - how it is. And at least I went along with it enough that I can read."

"And that makes you very special, doesn't it. Such a good compliant slave. Their favorite."

She spends a little bit mentally reminding herself of all of her really really excellent reasons not to hit him. It takes her longer than it should to stop wanting to.

"It makes me someone who can ever work a job that doesn't involve burying dead bodies and occasionally getting attacked by zombies. Sorry I can't just run off to fairyland, or be someone who has eight hundred thousand dollars to throw around, okay, but some people have to work with situations that aren't fun, sometimes."

"I hope some day you get a very nice job sitting in an office reading all the obituaries for the people who never learned to read and reminding yourself that you're better than them."