From: David Kline <dkline@well.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 04:05:38 +0800
To: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Subject: Re: Dry Under the Waterfall
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960730135447.0085571c@panix.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960730085319.25477C-100000@well>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



You make some very good points about those too unsocialized, too 
unmotivated, too "declasse," as it were, to even enter the age of reading 
that began 500 years ago.

A question though: What about the 3 million hard-working, reading, 
middle-class folks who have been downsized into oblivion the last three 
years alone? What about the tens of millions of readers who had the skills
needed for the industrial age, but not for the information age?

Well, change means pain, and we'll get to the millennium one way or 
another. But we can do it the hard way or the easy way. The hard way 
means severe social dislocation, possibly even threats to democracy. The 
easy way seems the smarter approach -- no serious effort at reforming 
education and at skills retraining has ever been undertaken, and it seems 
a better use of our tax dollars than most of the crap it's spent on now.

David