"A lot of people have complaints about public schools but they're a lot better than nothing."

Are they? I never thought of that as something particularly important that way.

"Is everyone literate where you're from?"

"No, but they do not need to be," he enunciates carefully, "to work."

"There are no words for how much that is not the point."

"So what is?"

"People should be able to learn things even if it doesn't benefit potential employers."

"Employers?" Most people work at their family's farm or business or at whatever trade they picked to learn. There is not a lot of employing going on outside of high born people hiring personal minders and those tend to get a pretty well-rounded education...

"Okay I think we're hitting some cultural differences but, like--I'm having a really difficult time articulating this, but education is important, I just don't know if any of the examples I can think of would make any sense to you..."

Try anyway?

"People who are better educated make better choices for themselves. Advances in spreading information and teaching people things have often been followed by major cultural reform."

Oh, you meant in that sense. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.

"What sense did you think I meant?"

In the sense of, I guess object-level improvements? I mean, the sense most people would choose—like, if you ask a random farmer what the best improvement to his life would be he would not say 'learning to read' and the government wouldn't, either.

"Learning to read is an object level improvement, I think, but granted not one that's especially urgent compared to other relevant ones."

I personally am biased compared to my world's population, I'm pretty sure, but I suppose your world is pretty strong evidence that educating everyone has way better long-term results than I'd been projecting. I'd been mostly thinking of it as a tool to, like, make people start questioning their culture and religion.

"It's really good for that! But it's also really good for other stuff--like, you might think higher education is useless for a farmer, but no, there's all kinds of scientific agricultural stuff that's really useful for farmers to know."

Technology is so good. Your world is so good.

"These things are true!"

Bacon is also good. Nom.

Bacon is generally considered to be delicious, yes.

"So it's actually a school break, we don't have major demands on our time for the next while, how do you want to prioritize?"

Hmm, my comparative advantage is staring at magic, but that's going to be a very long, time-consuming project if your magical girlness and that artefact were anything to go by, unless sorcery is somehow markedly simpler. I can be more directly useful if I manage to find a way to replenish my mana, though, then I can actually do magic without having to worry about not spending it outside emergencies.

"That makes sense. Well, if you wanted some convenient sorcery to look at, you could poke your head out the window and look at the light pollution ward, although please don't convert any of that into mana if you can do that. I could try some spells and see if you could get mana from them?"

"Oooh, light pollution ward? And yes, the spells are—" A good idea.

He looks out the window.

There is a giant magical dome covering the entire city. It's significantly less complicated than any of the other magic things he's seen so far here, but still significantly more complicated than anything he's seen at home.