There is no way to end up properly literate and capable of effective analysis while avoiding all objectionable or off-color content. It’s a desire to hide an entire section of human experience away, where dealing with it is critical to maturity.
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And this is the very point. Keep them uneducated, incapable of critical thinking and easily manipulated. Education is only for the superior few. The rest only need to know to obey their betters. (I wish there was a /s for this, but this is where we are)
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Then there’s the Wife of Bath.
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In the late 90s, my English teacher edited VHS’s of both the Zeffirelli R&J and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden with scotch tape. The curriculum she taught was apparently set in the late 70s and never updated. We also read the stage play version—not the novel itself—of Up the Down Staircase and watched the movie which, regrettably, featured no doctored nude scenes.
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ðe must sý micellic styrnlic hwæðere êowerdogian ðolian.
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My mom dragged me and a couple of her lady-friends along. One of her friends expressed disgust when nudity (as incredibly brief as it was) was shown. What an idiot.
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My English teacher was quite happy to explain all the dirty jokes in Shakespeare. Well, the ones in the first few pages anyway. If he’d explained every single one we’d have never finished the play.
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We watched it (the '68 version) in 9th grade in Pennsyltucky, BUT when it came to the nekkid-sexy part, the teacher turned the TV around to face the blackboard. But he didn’t fast forward it. He just watched it himself in real time while we stared at him and/or tried to catch a glimpse in very distorted reflection on the blackboard. It was…weird.
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Came here to bite my thumb at someone.
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Hot damn. Golden historic cultural reference. 
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Print on demand publishers engage in the worst puffery. “You’ll need these books, in case civilization collapses, and you need to establish a new society based on 19th century technology.”
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I mean, a reference book for human waste composting, water treatment, wood gasification, irrigation, field medicine, basic metallurgy and foundry-work, etc. is always handy.
Friends like to play zombie apocalypse prep, and the degree to which they go to ensure access to recreate 19th century tech in the backyard can be a bit overboard.
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Truth is there’s a sort of logic to it. Late 19th/early 20th century tech is kind of a sweet spot where you could rebuild at that level with a big enough group of people and some modest knowledge. You can farm, build a water wheel, grind flour, do basic foundry work, get a line shaft machine shop going, etc. To go newer than that, you start needing oil refining, silicon chip production (which requires ISO level 1 clean rooms and a whole supply chain of fancy chemistry), biomedical labs, plastic injection moulding, 10k ton hydraulic sheet metal stamping, and a lot of other things that require entire global supply chains to get up and running. It took us 100 years to build that stuff up, and it would take 100 to do it again. Right up to about 1920, though, a hundred motivated people in a village near the right natural resources could do it.
Not that I’ve… uh… spent any time thinking about this. cough
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Books are also a very durable technology. Even in the absence of a societal collapse I’m not optimistic that most information currently stored as digital media will be easily accessible generations from now.
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Edited because I had two windows open to combine quotes from different posts and totally stuffed up, submitting from the wrong window.
What? How do even understand a play if you don’t read the whole things?
I think it only goes unnoticed now because the meanings of words have changed or been lost. One of my high school English teachers explained it as an economic decision. There weren’t enough rich people buying seats in the stalls to make the play profitable. Wealth and education were rare. They needed the large uneducated masses each paying a farthing to stand in the mosh pit in front of the stage. The play had to contain enough blatantly obvious bawdy jokes to keep them entertained, otherwise they’d start chucking rotten fruit at the actors. Sure - A lot of the puns are quite clever, but if you read the footnotes to understand what the words meant at that time, and remember the actors would have presented them with appropriate leers and suitable hand actions, even the drunks in the mosh pit would have got the jokes.
Still amazes me that Walkabout got past the censors, particularly the swimming hole montage used in the closing credits. Most of the nudity is completely non-sexual, but I had the impression that the censor boards in the 70s would have banned any underage nudity.
Unfortunately, he also uses thousands of words which are no longer in common English, so most of us can’t understand without extensive footnotes.
And the rest of this post is a general aged rant which should probably contain the phrase “Get off my lawn you damn kids”.
In New South Wales, Australia, the English school syllabi for the last 2 years of high school did a major split about 60 years ago. They kept the “advanced subjects” that studied novels, plays and poetry, including those involving archaic spelling like Shakespeare, Donne and Coleridge. They introduced a new subject (2 Unit A English) that did away with most of that and concentrated on teaching comprehension of commonly used English, being able to think critically about it and being able write well enough to get your own ideas across to readers. There were clear warnings that this new subject was not intended for anyone considering progressing to tertiary study, meaning university or colleges of advanced education. (Australia subsequently merged/converted all the colleges into universities.)
Turned out that to teach people to write clearly, they didn’t need to be able understand poetry, or read long books and plays. They could learn the technique from analysing short articles.
Turned out that to teach people to write well you didn’t even need to restrict yourself to studying great writing. Studying and fixing poor writing from say a newspaper also worked.
Turned out that if you wanted to teach someone to read critically, you were actually better of studying short works that contained faulty logic rather than studying great literature.
Turned out lots of students students actually preferred the new subject.
And the real kicker: Unless you wanted to study literature at tertiary level, turned out the tertiary institutions were quite happy with you doing the new subject that wasn’t intended for those progressing to tertiary study. Alas, that bit became clear a little too late for me so I slogged through the old-style syllabus.
I think I studied four different Shakespeare plays over high school, and could never really see the point. About 1/3 of each book was footnotes explaining all the archaic words or explanations of how he was parodying some other work which has since been forgotten. When I had to read four lines of footnote to understand a one line pun, I could admit that it was technically very funny, but never once had the urge to laugh.
The older literature subjects still exist for those who want them, but that’s a rapidly declining group.
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A million years ago when i was a theatre tech, there was an improvising Shakespeare class that spawned a production of All’s Well That Ends Well, done in cowboys and indians costumes. That slow fade on “Yellow Rose of Texas” while Helen and Paroles discuss virginity is seared into my memory forever.
350 seat theatre. Our largest audience was 30 people. 20 never came back after intermision.
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Oh… there are definitely more long-term stable digital archival methods, if people were to plan ahead to have those references ready. (Edit: books are really not that durable. The vast majority of the ones we produce have such an unbalanced pH that they’re ticking time-bombs. For archival quality, you need better paper.)
Can you build an ISO clean room where you are in your tech stack? Noooo
Can you keep a digital archive of ISO standards to define what needs to happen later when you develop more precision capacity? Yes.
It’s really a question of what ground-work must be in place for a stable, sustainable community, first, and then what it takes to bootstrap things back while you can take advantage of a digital archive of advanced tech. Speedrun of industrialization, if you will.
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More stable than print, though? Not likely.
Which very much exists. We have many examples of written records that have survived thousands of years.
Which is not to say we shouldn’t make a good faith effort to create robust digital archives as well, it’s just that less complicated systems have less likelihood of long-term failure.
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