Every schoolboy starts over

Claim (verbatim)

Every schoolboy starts over. Restart pedagogy should be fossilized in the attestation statistics of Dunhuang school texts. A student copied the Qianziwen from the top, daily, abandoning and restarting, so a text learned this way survives as a population of heads. Scriptures, copied through for merit, should be attested roughly uniformly across their length; primers should show a steep monotone decay of attestation from incipit to explicit. The shape of the attestation curve is the shape of the pedagogy — and notably monotone, not U-shaped: no completion ritual pulled students to the end.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Pool all IDP-catalogued Dunhuang exercise copies and fragments of the Qianziwen; for each 100-graph segment of the text, count attestations. Primary clause (verdict follows it): the first 100 graphs are attested at least five times as often as the last 100. Secondary: one-juan sutras of comparable length show a first-to-last attestation ratio below 2, confirming the decay is pedagogic rather than taphonomic; and the decay is monotone rather than U-shaped.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the International Dunhuang Programme catalogue of Qianziwen copies and school exercises in the Stein and Pelliot collections — a well-delimited, fully imaged group.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The pedagogy is documented: the Qianziwen was among the most-copied Dunhuang student texts, copied as regular handwriting-and-vocabulary homework, and 'manuscripts of practicing handwriting and learning words account for the largest number' -- restart-from-the-top copying is the recognized practice (Dunhuang basic-education scholarship). Not located: the item's specific attestation-shape measurement -- pooling IDP Qianziwen exercise fragments and counting attestations per 100-graph segment to show the first 100 graphs attested >=5x the last 100, monotone (not U-shaped) decay, against a <2 first-to-last ratio for comparable one-juan sutras as a taphonomic control. The restart pedagogy is established; the attestation-curve-as-pedagogy-fossil measurement is unrun.

• Dunhuang basic-education scholarship on the Qianziwen as the dominant primer/handwriting-exercise text (glorisun 'Dunhuang Manuscripts: An Introduction'; 'The Textbooks of Basic Dunhuang Education') — Repeated primer copying documented; the segment-attestation decay curve is the unrun measurement
• IDP catalogue of Qianziwen copies and school exercises in the Stein and Pelliot collections — The kill dataset; a well-delimited, fully imaged group

Predictions

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