"Oh, you're offering that much? Well, I won't turn it down. Shall I zip us over there smart quick?"

"Yeah, please do!"

Whoosh. 

"Here we are. How can my otherworldly insight help you today, good sir?"

"Come in if you'd like. So I have some experimental laws I'd like to try and since you've experienced a pretty different world I thought you might have some guesses about what's likely to happen if I do. First of all I was thinking of filming free classes like Hari is the Language of the Empire for other subjects and then requiring that anyone who owns a child educate them. I'm hoping if I try that I can point to a lower crime rate or a more useful adult population or something to convince other states to try something similar, but if it wouldn't work that way I don't want to have it be seen to fail..."

"Ah. Education is not something I have much experience with. But I think just making people make their kids watch videos isn't going to cause much actual learning. I feel uncomfortable advising you very much on this, I repeat, because I have never been and never intend to be a kids' schoolteacher. But kids need a teacher, not just books or videos. At least, human kids. Also, I'm not sure what a great testing system looks like, but I know a bad one looks like overuse and over-reliance on standardized tests. Resist the urge to rely on standardized tests too much. If your test score is all you care about, and if teachers get paid by how well students do on their tests, the incentives get all skewed and nobody learns as much. Also don't make everyone learn at the same pace... I'll probably be able to dig up a book on it which will be more helpful to you than I am, myself."

"Okay. So that's probably too complicated and expensive to mandate right now. I do still want to get more people more educated as children, though, any ideas how to reach kids whose parents don't just want them educated because they want them to do well in life?"

"Just make basic educational illusions free for certain things? Basic math and finance skills, reading and writing. But not requiring them. That will get non-zero numbers of people educated and is relatively cheap and unlikely to backfire. Maybe exempt people from the slave tax if their slaves are children who are receiving a proper education, but then you get into problems of standardization and verification again. Maybe include magic-work-applicable stuff to teach their kids, but only if they learn the rest of it first."

"Okay, I can make things available and then figure out the rest later. I'm still thinking about what I can ask of people who won't be glad to have a chance to help their kids. What kinds of things were illegal to do to children where you were from?"

"Making 'em work more than a little bit before they're 16, anything to do with sex they're really serious about that, hit 'em, never talk to 'em, not feed 'em right or give them medical care, not let them socialize with other children, not give them some kind of education, leave them alone around dangerous things like power tools or guns - I think 'not binding them against magic use before they know how to control it' would be this world's version of that... Hmm..."

"Well, no one has to be told not to let little kids do magic, it's not just themselves they hurt. Do any of those pay off in less criminal adults or smarter adults or anything? Or do they just benefit the kids?"

"And spelling that out as a separate law might just cause confusion. Poor nutrition as a child, lack of proper medical care, and being exposed to lead and other such bad things are well correlated to stupider and more criminal adults. Education is somewhat correlated to adults who commit less crime and earn more money - people from 'good' schools are noticeably different than those from 'bad' ones. But this is kind of confounded by other social conditions and while I would naively expect it to hold up it's not as proven. Same thing with socialization. I should probably dig up the actual studies, they might be on my library somewhere, or you can find 'em next time you get Milliways."

"Good, that'll make things a lot easier. I'm not sure how to make it illegal to damage kids and without creating bad incentives or leaving some people no legal choices. Maybe if I pay people for freeing them without any brain damage or anything within a year of them reaching the age of majority for their species? Do you think that'd work?"

"Possible. I think making the slave tax not apply to children who are being treated properly would be a good step. Possibly while also paying people for freeing capable, lawful people at majority. It's like paying people who free adult slaves, except in smaller, sooner chunks. It'd encourage them to start, getting a packet that says 'responsible child care tax refund!' every few months, and doesn't discourage childbearing in people who want to help their kids, that way."

"I think I can do something like that! How would you determine who should get the tax refund?"

"Yeah, that's the hard part. Knowledge magic to see if the kid's getting fed right and not being hurt on a regular basis? And if they have medical problems, documents showing that they're trying to treat it. You can ask the kid if their parents hit them and let them learn things but they'll have every reason to lie if they'll get in trouble for admitting that and costing the parents their refund, maybe a bad idea without lots more care in designing it. Checking that the kid watched the free videos you put out somewhere public at least a couple times? If the kid can pass relatively easy standardized tests? They're bad to overuse but maybe better than nothing."

"I haven't taken a lot of tests but maybe I can come up with one or find someone who knows how to do that. I don't want them to get in trouble for talking about what's happening. I could have someone check for bruises but they might want to refuse that for privacy reasons and I don't want to punish parents for not forcing their children to let people look at them. ...This is hard, are people where you're from really deterred by the law or just by their own morals?"

"It's very, very, very hard. You need books on statecraft, because fucking this up will make hundreds of people suffer and discredit the whole thing and I am not qualified for it, and yet I am possibly the best qualified. Which is scary. I will translate anything I have that I think will be useful on statecraft and laws for... Seventy two rings an hour and you providing the paper and ink. Just ask Mahan how fast I translate. Small groups of moral humans, two hundred or so, can function without laws enforced from above. Not so much bigger ones. Did you talk to the priest in New Dover about this?"

"Thanks, I hadn't thought of that yet. I'll talk to the priest and I'd like your books whenever you have time to translate them."

"So very busy. And Milliways - I can't just go and buy all the books ever from Bar, even my future tech has limits, and she charges me for those."

He sighs. "You have good intentions. And you're being thoughtful and careful. And it'll be hard to make things worse than doing nothing would. Still, the road to - fiery death place - is paved with good intentions."

"Where's the fiery death place we don't have a word for?"

"That's 'hell'. A lot of religions say that immoral people go there after death and get tortured. There's not always a way to tell whether any particular hell is real, but the idea has cultural inertia. In my world places called 'hell' existed but none of them appeared to collect dead humans."

"That sounds worse than what's happening here. Do you think the chance one is real is high enough that next time I find Milliways I should wait to get a door to a hell and take it over?"

"I think attempting to take over a Hell with anything less than the power of a god is a terrible idea that will get you killed."

"I can get a god to help if I can kill the other god she's busy fighting. Do you think finding a way to do that is a better use of my time than trying to introduce morality to Har?"

"I have no god damned idea. I just want to be out of the blast radius when you try it, okay?"