"Wow, you've really been having a... time."

"Yeah, it sucked. But we won, so, sucked worse for our enemy."

"Congratulations."

"I think I'll like it better when we get enough shinobi and enough economic stability to open a university. That sounds more like a thing to congratulate."

"I hope we can help! I'm probably not going to go to the presses until we have transit, since you'll do that faster than a mage, but after that it'll be pretty easy to prove."

"Hopefully! And - we'd like to help back. Not just receive help."

"Yeah, and you can! Magic items we don't have cracked at all."

She laughs. "It'll take some work to make them broadly usable and mass produce-able, but, well. I don't think anyone will mind sending a lot of genin - apprentice shinobi - to sit and poke seals in between lessons. Could probably have a seal master as their teacher, even, we're trying to also train up more seal masters now... And that's something it's easy to track civilian-born kids for, since you don't need good chakra control or capacity, but farmers are already plenty good at math and analysis."

"...okay, what economic conditions lead to you having ninety percent farmers and also the farmers get math educations?"

" - It's not handled by education systems? Girls learn from their mothers. How to calculate ideal plot sizes for each quality, layouts of plants and the like, fertilizer and seed requirements, harvest times, yields, how much food your family needs and how long until the next harvest, if you're short how much can you reduce each person's rations without sending your household into collapse. That's just for farming, and then textiles are even more math - a bit closer to everyday seal math, actually - and farming households are also weaving households, and the larger ones are also the basis of a lot of industries - you contract out to farmers during the winter if you want people to produce something."

"Oh, okay, so not like calculus."

"I mean you can use practical calculus for some of those, but, yeah, theoretical maths don't come up much - but farmers and weavers aren't stupid, and they'll learn theoretical maths just fine if needed. And for every trade most people become apprentices at twelve, anyways, so - by the time they'd be really even able to learn the advanced math, they're shinobi with civilian parents."

"Cool. Okay, you want industrialization in basically full generality and we want magic items, anything else popping out?"

She hums.

"New technologies can cause wage crashes if they're rolled out - poorly, I guess, and you can end up with a lot of people in a desperate situation... We'd want to avoid that, but that'll mostly be - really robust ways to transition people to 'not being subsistence farmers and weavers' without disrupting existing communities more than the cataclysm already did. Teachers would help, upfront load of supplies would help - even if we can just use food to bribe parents to send their children to school instead of to - factories or whatever, that'll change the dynamic of the shift. Not disrupting communities could also mean very decentralized schools right now, so, more teachers... And we'll want an idea of what everyone's doing instead of subsistence production, since I'm assuming your world can't catapult us straight to post-scarcity. Also, broad history knowledge - your world industrialized, right, so we'll want to look at how it's gone here, to at least estimate where pitfalls we can avoid are."

"Adults are harder to retrain in general - but what we're retraining them too is also going to depend on what we import, and how trade affects our economy, and the like. Probably our ideal is going to be training as many kids as we can as shinobi, but that'll also mean at least a short period of intergenerational instability, since no one's going to have the same career as their parents..."

"We're not post-scarcity ourselves, but we do have an industrialization example to go by. Is people having the same career as their parents normally very important?"

"It is culturally, which ends up meaning 'it is psychologically.' But kids raised by parents in their trade do also learn the relevant skills earlier - that makes a big difference with chakra training, actually, especially since really young kids need to be supervised if they're learning magic more than teachers can manage, and civilian parents don't tend to be able to treat or even always spot 'kid is sending themselves into chakra exhaustion.' But that's something we're going to have to solve on a generational scale, we're not taking kids from their families."

"I'm glad to hear that. Chakra exhaustion is -"

"Chakra is an energy. Our bodies produce it, though we're not entirely sure how - producing chakra burns calories, so there's something biological happening there at least."

"It's less important if you've never used chakra, but our bodies get steadily more reliant on it as we use it, and as we use up chakra there's less in our bodies to use - which can cause medical problems. If you run so low you can't use magic without injuring yourself, that's chakra exhaustion. Most of the medical problems are stuff like hypothermia, weakness, dizziness, low blood pressure, full body pain, which all get worse the lower you get on chakra, but you can get other things happening."

"Chakra exhaustion can be deadly, too - usually only 'without medical care,' but if you drop low enough it can get seriously dicey, and some people manage to give themselves heart attacks by dropping too low too fast."

"Usually, chakra exhaustion isn't a problem for most shinobi, but children have small reserves, so run a thinner margin, don't always recognize the feeling of getting low on chakra, and don't have a good sense yet of how reckless they can afford to be. But there's tradeoffs - it's less effective and sometimes more dangerous to learn to access chakra for the first time when you're older, since your ability to sense and manipulate your own chakra goes down over time if you never use those skills."

"Huh, our magic costs calories too but if we overdo it we pass out and wake up hungry is usually the worst it gets."

"Convenient."

"Yeah, I mean it's more complicated if there's any preexisting issue but it's not that dangerous as long as there's food around. So the ideal case would probably be having kids practice with supervision but this has historically been hard to scale for farmer reasons?"

"Also for 'kids are dumb' reasons. You basically need to be constantly supervising very small kids to make sure they aren't getting overexcited about magic, and not every family can do that - or recognize if a kid is even using magic."

"The norm in my state, Konoha, was that children could test into the Academy, from any family - the kids were told the entrance exams were about things like reading and math and physical ability, but those were more placement tests with some medical evaluation mixed in, and instead we'd be put into situations that let the teachers evaluate things like our impulse control, caution, self awareness, and ability to follow directions while we didn't know we were being watched. That system isn't perfect - subjective judgement introduces chances for bias, if nothing else - but it mostly works, and then you also educate the parents about chakra exhaustion. We did also though require all families with students in the Academy to live within the village walls, where most shinobi lived, which patches some stuff too - Konoha has a really pro-family culture, and shinobi especially tend to not mind parenting random kids."

"It doesn't scale perfectly, though, especially the parts leaning on just having ambient adult shinobi around. Still, most Academy kids hit the cut offs between six and nine - but we're finding now that kids who aren't raised around shinobi can hit those milestones later than we'd like, and tend to be a lot more likely to experiment on their own, and the drop off in potential gets pretty bad from six to about fourteen."

"Also Konoha shinobi are apparently really, really unusually inclined to parent random children, we're having - culture issues, with everyone else, and there's a wider gap between civilian and shinobi cultures in most nations than there is in ours, which adds to parents being reluctant to have their kids trained."

"That sounds rough and not the sort of thing you can import along with a combine harvester, alas."

"Yeah."

"Some of the other nations think we should be starting residential schools, but unfortunately for them Konoha is the most populous shinobi nation and we are not child thieves and we're also the only ones who already had programs for civilian-born shinobi, so they can - "

She pauses and collects herself. "...Thing that is improper and undiplomatic to say, especially when I don't know your culture's opinion on vulgarity."

Not really pausing for comment: "But we can get decent effects teaching ten through fourteen year olds, and female civilian kids do better earlier on self control metrics and that's the only major point where you get long-term societal impacts from which age education started at. And we don't need everyone up to traditional standards, anyways, and then the next generation will have more shinobi parents."

"Right. Do you suppose people from here can learn?"