The Simpsons: "The Miseducation of Lisa Simpson"
The Simpsons: "The Miseducation of Lisa Simpson." Season 31, episode 12 (16 February 2020).
"Marge convinces the townspeople to build Springfield's first S.T.E.M. school using the money from a treasure the sea captain had been searching for all his life."[1]
The school, however, trains a small number of gifted students in what are currently seen by a kind of geek-ocracy as the jobs of the future, and the rest for mindless distance-drudgery via a virtual-reality Waldo-like interface. Ultimately, of course — The Simpsons being a satire — the robots will take over and all that will be left to do for human in elder care at the best, enslaved soda-delivery to our robot masters at worst. Note the tradition of dystopic future-labor from Karel Čapek's R. U. R. to Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS to Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano to READY PLAYER ONE (film).
Also of interest: the S.T.E.M. Academy is the one school Bart Simpson likes, even though with its surveillance, training kids to be figurative cogs in digitalized machines, and an environment of technology out of control and in command — viewers might find it a bit scary (for a mildly happy ending, one of the last tropes/clichés sent up is the school's self-destruction when its AI algorithms are humiliated by low user ratings).
For the evolution of technology, note well Homer's taking on a high-tech soda-dispensing machine with the musical accompaniment of a post-modernized "John Henry" and the action a post-modernized version of John Henry as a steel-driving man "in a race against a steam-powered rock drilling machine."[2] John Henry is a muscular, heroic figure striving against 19th-c. technology; Homer is Homer, trying to save as a human job the dispensing of soft drinks.
Summarized and discussed competently (and largely negatively) by Tony Sokol on the Den of Geek website (16Feb20).[3] Sokol adds to the cultural works referenced in this highly-allusive episode, to which we'll add the bit of title trivia that "The Dynamo and the Virgin" essay — a classic on technology and culture — is chapter XXV of The Education of Henry Adams.
RDE, Initial Compiler 16Feb20