Answer: de-invent television, the Web, texting, cell phones, video games, computer games, IPODs, and perhaps movies and recorded sound as well. Some (not all) of these things are good when used sparingly, but collectively they have led to a massive deficit in intellectual seriousness and emotional depth in our society. The average American today is less, not more, civilized in key respects (I would say in most) than was the case 150 years ago.

Yes. In short, we can't recover literacy and depth.

I tell my undergrad students that their education in high school was inferior to what a black student one hundred years ago in some segregated school with cast-off textbooks would have gotten. They don't get it.

2: I think not, in regard to the population as a whole.