Long read. But this has been known for over 20 years.
> Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly.
"Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century"
A good idea to consider might be what Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to as "second-order illiteracy".
> [The second-order illiterate] has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate's sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.
> It's a fair question, but it irritates me because it suggests that we should accept the self-destruction of vast swaths of the population in the name of perfect liberty.
I do think that this blog post is quaint and I find it hard to hate on a guy showing up at his kid's school and giving a talk—oh boy, remember when your parents came to school? Or anyone's parents. Especially a dad? Woowee.
The cynic in me can't resist remarks like "the children yearn for the mines".
Then another part of me thinks...how much of a factory is "just a room" to the people who are not its engineers, designers and owners.
Does the sweaty work in a factory net you the same sort of socioeconomic leverage that it used to? The other day I had a thought that a lot of 2000s sitcoms had dads who managed factories. George Lopez. Damon Wayans. Jim Belushi? Doug Heffernan drove for UPS.
You know, just think, in about 20 years some of these kids in that classroom may just be supervising the young adults of today who failed to make the right pivot in the labor market. The Lindy effect suggests that this blog will be around long enough to show those old guys this post to see if they agree.
I get where you're coming from.
I think that the clock sounds dumb too.
But what makes life "possible and enjoyable" in the most mundane sort of way that every human being can agree with relies on STEM. Before that though is the role that religion has in making life possible and enjoyable in ways that are beyond cold reason and material exploits.
I recognized this submission from its title but did not remember what it was about. For some reason this anecdote reminded me. Yes now I know it's about the man who built staircases with his father.