"...reference books, encyclopedias, rolodexes, filing cabinets..." were all nicely curated. Today the signal to noise ratio is extremely bad.
It's more productive having somebody show you how to do something, than trying to learn it yourself. Perhaps in the 1980s when the economy was going better, it was easier to connect with people willing to share, teach, mentor. Perhaps people have been forced to be more competitive now. Also, cut back in education meant many programs have been cut.
We would not feel so stagnant if manufacturing was more of a thing in N. America. Lots more factories with lots more 3d printers, laser cutters, drone, robots would exist. If you needed to get your hands on some such tool, you'd only have to ask around. 3D printers didn't penetrate the home like desktop publishing did in the 1980s and 90s.
What is the point you're trying to make here? That somehow people were better off for having to spend hours thumbing through books instead of searching things on the Web?
The fastest way of learning something is to have a professional teach you. Not even the Internet can beat that. Because of cut backs to education, we have fewer good mentors. Because of loss in manufacturing in N. America there are fewer skilled professionals to pass on their knowledge.
Plenty of professionals are out there teaching on youtube. I can fix my car, my plumbing, my electrical, I can frame an addition to my house, I can setup an irrigation system. Rebuild a chainsaw, build my own furniture, refinish my floor, fix my drywall, concrete flatwork. These are all things I've done in the past year. The proliferation of digital video, high quality cameras, microphones and editing software has made it easier than ever to learn from professionals. Books just aren't the same thing.
We have all the internet but damn even books are better and broader today. I can order that rare special indy book and print it on demand and have it show up in 3 days
There are a lot of how to guides. Anything requiring a longer attention span or curated lesson is not promoted by the algorithm or facilitated well online. I mentor developers on a regular basis. Unless they need a book to get foundational knowledge or a recipe on how to make something very specific, I teach it myself because there's no adequate YouTube tutorial.
There's also no YouTube tutorial to tell you something like "don't mix types of metals for you gas plumbing or you'll kill your family" because there's no professional watching you make stupid mistakes.
I have books on math from encyclopedias from parents from the 80's weighting more than 4 KG each.
Now I can just fire up a browser and understand a hard math concept in minutes in a much easier way. With free as in freedom CAS tools and such, and with a netbook bought at a ridiculous price 20x cheaper than the book volume set itself,
which back in the day costed A LOT.
You are making several big logical jumps here that I don't think are connected. This sounds more like a dinner table conversation among some conservatives validating each other's worldviews than a constructive discussion point.
There are arguably more opportunities now for learning things from a professional than in the past.
Public schooling has very rarely been about mentorship anyway. Arguably higher education always was to some extent, but it very often still is; you end up in debt nowadays, but it's still widely accessible.
And I don't see what loss of manufacturing has to do with anything. Some of those manufacturing jobs were in skilled trades, sure, but there are still plenty of opportunities still to learn skilled trades. And even then, I don't think that has much of anything to do with learning things from a book at the library vs. a course on the Web.
It's more productive having somebody show you how to do something, than trying to learn it yourself. Perhaps in the 1980s when the economy was going better, it was easier to connect with people willing to share, teach, mentor. Perhaps people have been forced to be more competitive now. Also, cut back in education meant many programs have been cut.
We would not feel so stagnant if manufacturing was more of a thing in N. America. Lots more factories with lots more 3d printers, laser cutters, drone, robots would exist. If you needed to get your hands on some such tool, you'd only have to ask around. 3D printers didn't penetrate the home like desktop publishing did in the 1980s and 90s.