Madelineblackbart: Created page with "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,..."

2026-09-26T21:50:13Z

Created page with "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,..."

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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.

== See also ==

* [[The Household]] · [[The Trades#Apprenticeship]] · [[Reading]] · [[The Oathbond#Growing into it]]

Growing Up and School - Revision history