Last Task Quote Interpretation Explain what you think the following quote means Apply it to Fahrenheit 451 and to our own society What matters in our age is not just that people read for information or for amusement or for whatever else the television screen and computer terminal can alternatively provide It is that they read for wisdom for depth for a conscious acquaintance with the values and judgments of great thinkers thinking greatly The tragedy of illiteracy and the even greater waste of alliteracy involving those who know how to read seriously but don t is that it abandons the accumulated wisdom of the ages It places fine writing in the hands of fewer and fewer interpreters whose translations and commentaries become progressively oversimplified and whose audience increasingly unable to think for itself grows more and more susceptible to the manipulations of the elite Are we headed then backwards into the pre print attitudes of the Middle Ages when the literate few ruled the illiterate many Our sense of democracy should rise in rebellion at such a notion To avert such backsliding the last years of this century must be given over to two things training people how to read and teaching them why they should want to read Rushworth Kidder