Growing Up and School
Children are born free, all of them. A child born to a slave is free, unmarked, and never collared, whoever the father was; see Nyvra and Children.
Small children
A child under six belongs to the household and gets underfoot in it, minded by a mother, a grandmother, an older sister, a hired woman, or the household's slave — and in a crowded street by the neighbor already watching two. Children are let out: the street, the yard, the court, the ring on a farm, and back when hungry or shouted for. Nobody in a walled city worries much about where a child is, which is exactly the habit that makes the Frontier so dangerous to them later. They are put to small use early — bread, oil, ice, messages, a younger sibling, the animals — and on a farm or in a Roedhaven more of it and earlier. What does not happen is a child at a bench: no guild takes anybody before apprenticeship, no workshop keeps children, and no city has ever had a use for small hands in quantity, because nothing here is made in quantity.
School
Schooling begins at six or seven and runs to about fourteen, and almost every child in a city gets it. Nobody is made to go; an education forced on a child regardless of their nature contradicts the one thing the world insists on. So the family sends the child, because a person who cannot read cannot examine anything, least of all themselves. Schooling costs nothing, so a parent whose child reaches fourteen unable to read has no explanation anybody will accept — a failure of the Family aspect that can be tested with a page and a child. The neighbors know first; a guild asked to bind an apprentice who cannot read his own indenture asks the family why, and the asking is the punishment.
- City schools
- Free everywhere, and who pays says a good deal. The Senate in Shining Reach, arguing about the figure yearly. The guilds in Forgegate, who say plainly that an apprentice who can read a contract is worth more at the bench. The Registrars in Clearhold, whose schools are the most thorough in the world because a government recruited by examination needs every child able to sit one. The lineage halls in Eldershore, by their size. The harbormaster's dues in Stormharbor, agreed at the Thing, so everything crossing the quay pays a little.
- Neighborhood schools
- One teacher, one room, a modest fee, for smaller classes or a particular teacher — a person of standing on their own street and nowhere else, and a good one spoken of for two generations after.
- Tutors
- For the wealthy, often shared between two or three households, which is how children of the same street end up educated together and knowing each other for life.
A farm or Roedhaven child may be taught at home instead, which works better than an outsider expects, because a household that reads teaches reading. The Iron Coves run no schools and nobody is shamed for it; what there is instead is a plain incentive — a hand who cannot read a manifest cannot check what he is owed, cannot navigate, and will never be a quartermaster or a captain. So every Coves family that can teach its children does, and the ones that cannot know exactly what it costs them and pay it anyway.
What every child is told
Two things get taught at home in every city and neither is written down. The first is the Frontier: never travel alone, never leave the road, never follow a voice whose source you cannot see. The second is said to daughters, once, plainly, usually by a mother and earlier than the daughter expects: beyond the walls the Fyndrecht holds, and a woman found alone is more often kept than ransomed. It is not a lesson. It is a conversation, and it is why a woman of any city thinks hard before traveling without a caravan.
After fourteen
Most take an apprenticeship, enter the family trade, or go to the farm — six years living in a master's house, earning keep (see The Trades). In Stormharbor a boy makes a first voyage; in Forgegate he is bound before a guild; in each case it is the moment his conduct starts being discussed as his own. A minority stays in education: the Academy in Shining Reach takes students at fourteen and holds them to eighteen or twenty, producing the world's advocates, physicians, and most of its philosophers; Clearhold's candidates prepare for the examinations into their twenties. Nobody arrives at adulthood on a stated day. What each city points at is the thing that happened at fourteen.
Slaves' children
Free, and schooled, at the city school or the neighborhood one with the household paying the fee, sitting in the same room as the neighbors' children. See Nyvra and Children for what such a child holds and does not.