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Libraries are a more romantic and sensual place to interact with words than a computer screen is. I have had dreams about being in libraries full of arcane knowledge, I cannot remember ever having had a dream about surfing Wikipedia. You yourself say that you dream of having one.
I think that what we should really get rid of is mandatory education. It is a day care program dishonestly masquerading as an educational system and it packs kids into close contact with each other right at the age at which most of them behave more like chimpanzees than at any point before or after in their lives. To force this on people is fundamentally abusive. School also trains kids that what they should expect from life is to be closely observed and trained by bureaucrats. And in the age of the Internet, school is also near-irrelevant as a source of learning when it comes to anything above very basic math and reading skills.
Tear down the mandatory education system.
@VoxelVexillologist said below that classroom discipline is red-coded. I disagree. Some boring bureaucrat loser disciplining a bunch of kids into sitting still and listening to him drone on and on is at least as blue-coded as it is red-coded. Sure, maybe classroom discipline supported by a threat of violence is somewhat red-coded (and abusive), whereas classroom discipline maintained by nagging and shaming is more blue-coded (and also abusive, just not as much), but the actual goal of the education system is not red-coded. Really the education system is neither blue-coded nor red-coded. It is corporate-coded. It keeps kids out of their parents' way so that they can work and it prepares kids for a dull life working the cogs of the machine.
A kid's proper response to the education system is to tell the teacher to eat a dick. When I read about school shootings, my usual reaction is to wish that the kid had just focused on shooting teachers and staff instead of gunning down fellow kids.
Do you really think the little darlings who use that language in schools (and they already do) are the kind who are going to educate themselves via the Internet? Maybe if it's about how to get drugs, guns and hos, but nothing that will be useful for paid employment or being a productive member of society.
I don't know where you work, maybe you can get a day's work done with people screaming at you to eat a dick every time you ask them have they that file, did they finish loading that pallet, etc.
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Beautifully said! The mandatory education system is, along with factory farming, one of the most horrible moral abuses of our day. It's incredible how ordinary people just paper over the horror that kids must deal with, and think throwing more money at the problem will solve it.
Tear. It. Down!
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I've had dreams about trying to look up information on a smartphone. It's frustrating because I can't look up anything in a dream that I don't already know.
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