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?
I am as equally tired of this cliche as DCF is in his essay of his own pet peeve. in a capitalist economy, labor is best/optimally utilized through relocation when the nature of the economy changes as ours is. the massive *relocation* that is occuring in the workforce is in fact an indication that our economy is moving at light speed into the 21st century. I am tired of people that feel that the world owes them a job because they are alive. ultimately you must work to live in this world, and the only exceptions are those that have somehow twisted the "system" into feeding them otherwise and bankrupting it in the process. merely because you have a body does not mean you can provide a valuable service to the world. what? the world is valuing supposed "work" that involves nothing but dumbly moving one's appendages far less? well, whose fault is that? our economy is fairer than people want to admit-- we are seeing the signs that this is true, not that it is false. it has been drummed deeply into people's brains in the public educational establishment that education is a key concept of success. and someone gets to be 30 with few educational skills, finding it hard to get a job, and says, "nobody told me it would be like this"? "downsized into oblivion"? excuse me? because someone is laid off they evaporate? well, that is the conventional wisdom of course, in which the concept of firing is equivalent to execution in many people's minds. I have talked to various people who launched into new careers by going to school and picking up entirely new skills, perceiving their "layoff" as an opportunity instead of as a condemnation. a layoff is the economy saying to someone, "look, you may be a valuable person, but in this role there is not that much value. please try, try again". it is not a PROBLEM that people switch careers. its the natural price of having a state-of-the-art economy. another pet peeve of mine is PEOPLE WHO CHOOSE TO HAVE FAMILIES that they cannot necessarily support. yes, that's right-- it's a choice to have a family, and if you're a responsible person, you will think long and hard about what it means to your life if you decide to have kids and the lifetime commitment and cash it will require of you. ask how much thought went into this "decision" of some people, and you might be aghast. and why do they feel the government must pay them for their own mistake in judgement?
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.
as DCF said, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think. quite to the contrary college enrollment and student loans by the government are up enormously over the past few decades. also the GI bill is more popular than ever. however like you I would like to see more transfer of funds from supporting deadbeats funneled into the education system.. anyone who doesn't understand why our economy is moving the way it is should read Toffler who predicted the shift far before it occured. jobs are *not* being lost in the ultimate sense. our economy is undergoing a fundamental shift in which new jobs are being created in categories that defy old thinking such as within large corporations. if you only look at large corporations as the barometer of the economy (as most people do, encouraged by the media in a paranoid feedback loop), indeed it would look a lot like the world is ending.