General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: America's Dangerous Turn to Anti-Intellectualism [View all]Trillo
(9,154 posts)In my own set of studies, related to baking, a work called, "The Boston Cooking School Cookbook", I think first published in 1896 or thereabouts (going from memory), marked the beginning of the (I believe) intentional propagation of a flawed measurement system. Rather than censorship, this was the beginning of the use of books (I believe) to intentionally mislead. Immediately prior to then, standardization of recipes based on weight occurred, while further back there had been no standardization. After the Boston Cooking School Cookbook, a dual track system emerged, "professional" level baking books where weight was used as the measurement system, and "consumer" level books where volumetric measurement was used. So, if a consumer wanted to learn to bake, they'd perhaps begin buying books to self educate, but would be taught a system that complicated intuitive understanding via the inclusion of ingredients varying bulk densities. The professional level books seemed very difficult for consumers to find (at least until the Internet).
We are all trained in compulsory schools to get our knowledge from books. When you go to these consumer-level books, however, it seems we are intentionally mistrained.
We see this system today, where "consumers" are forced into compulsory education where when they complete 12 or 13 school years of hard and difficult work, afterwards they qualify for minimum wage working in a hostile workplace for authoritarian RW bosses (or corporatists), allegedly because they can't do anything valuable. But "professionals" on the other hand, go to college, and learn different systems, and end up with much higher incomes, based upon a different set of books that come a lot closer to teaching them valuable skillsets.
So it appears to me that censorship of books isn't the only problem, intentional mistraining also appears as a deliberate strategy that began in the 1900s. Sure, Citizen Public can go buy some books, and they can read until their eyeballs fall out, but they will never learn what they need to learn to make a decent income that provides them with a living wage.