Since I am neither dead nor a robot, and Plato-as-audioanimatronic lecturer might not be programmed to respond, let me answer as best I can.
The answer is: the students. The young people. The children.
They have led the revolution in reading and painting.
For the first time in the history of art and teaching, the children have become the teachers. Before our time, knowledge came down from the top of the pyramid to the broad base where the students survived as best they could. The gods spoke and the children listened.
But, lo! gravity reverses itself. The massive pyramid turns like a melting iceberg, until the boys and girls are on top. The base of the pyramid now teaches.
How did it happen? After all, back in the twen
ties and thirties, there were no science-fiction books in the curricula of schools anywhere. There were few in the libraries. Only once or twice a year did a responsible publisher dare to publish one or two books which could be designated as speculative fiction.
If you went into the average library as you motored across America in 1932, 1945, or 1953 you would have found:
No Edgar Rice Burroughs.
No L. Frank Baum and no Oz.
In 1958 or 1962 you would have found no Asimov, no Heinlein, no Van Vogt, and, er, no Bradbury.
Here and there, perhaps one book or two by the above. For the rest: a desert.
What were the reasons for this?
Among librarians and teachers there was then, and there still somewhat dimly persists, an idea, a notion, a concept that only Fact should be eaten with your Wheaties. Fantasy? That's for the Fire Birds. Fantasy, even when it takes science-fictional forms, which it often does, is dangerous. It is escapist. It is daydreaming. It has nothing to do with the world and the world's problems.
So said the snobs who did not know themselves as snobs.
So the shelves lay empty, the books untouched in publishers' bins, the subject untaught.
Comes the Evolution. The survival of that species called Child. The children, dying of starvation, hungry for ideas which lay all about in this fabulous land, locked into machines and architecture, struck out on their own. What did they do?
They walked into classrooms in Waukesha and Peoria and Neepawa and Cheyenne and Moose Jaw and Redwood City and placed a gentle bomb on teacher's desk. Instead of an apple it was Asimov.
"What's that?" the teacher asked, suspiciously.
"Try it. It's good for you," said the students.
"No thanks."
"Try it," said the students. "Read the first page. If you don't like it, stop." And the clever students turned and went away.
The teachers (and the librarians, later) put off reading, kept the book around the house for a few weeks and then, late one night, tried the first paragraph.
And the bomb exploded.
They not only read the first but the second paragraph, the second and third pages, the fourth and fifth chapters.
"My God!" they cried, almost in unison, "these damned books are about something!"
"Good Lord!" they cried, reading a second book, "there are Ideas here!"
"Holy Smoke!" they babbled, on their way through Clarke, heading into Heinlein, emerging from Sturgeon, "these books are-ugly word-relevant!"
"Yes!" shouted the chorus of kids starving in the yard. "Oh, my, yes!"
And the teachers began to teach, and discovered an amazing thing: