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There's a major problem with this quote, and it's that you can splice it into pieces almost immediately, here's some contextualisation that breaks her argument (this paragraph and more) very fast:

1. Compulsory schooling in the United States was relatively brand new. The first state to introduce it was Massachusetts in 1852, with the last state introducing it being Mississippi in 1917 (admittedly, I don't know how chronologically organise places turned into states or made into territories after 1917; for example, Hawai'i has a pretty old public school system that was set up under King Kamehameha III in 1840, but I'm pretty sure it was wildly altered after the overthrow of the Hawai'ian government in the 1890s).

2. Despite compulsory schooling being done, it was hard to monitor whether or not kids attended. Birth certificates actually made this kind of surveillance much easier, and those weren't even really uniformly used in the US until the 1930s. (Some of us have grandparents who didn't have birth certificates because they weren't in wide usage.) As a result, it was easier for families to keep children home despite the mandates of compulsory schooling.

3. Child labour laws weren't really introduced until 1938 (FSLA), and they weren't really fully enforced until 1950s (if they are at all). Again, a lot of us have grandparents who didn't complete the compulsory schooling of the time because they left early to go work in factories so they could help support their families.

4. Compulsory schooling was much shorter in the 1940s than is today. Unless you wanted to go to university, you were done at 15. It's like that'd impact student enrolment.

... And gee, I wonder why fewer (WHITE) women were working prior to WWII.

I am really struggling with the introduction to this book. In my most charitable, all I can say is that she wrote it hastily in order for her and her publishers to meet a deadline that would best allow them to profit from pandemic books.

But there are some lines and paragraphs that really stick out like sore thumbs, like how we're fortunate that hundreds of children died because it could've been much worse. Idk, I think any children dying to a pandemic is awful. I would've also thought she'd put some numbers up next to those for how still-living children were impacted by the loss of their caregivers because they died (which maybe she'll do... at some point?).

But there's a lot of attempts to justify the existence of schools because of all the responsibilities they have (but shouldn't) without even a glimmer of asking whether that makes any sense or what we could do instead.

I mean, it's obvious that this man is an excruciatingly racist piece of shit, but holy shit.

In 2011, we knew that the Broken Windows Theory was wrong and that Wilson/Kelling had misrepresented it with full intent to support racist policing. Pinker doesn't seem to care that Zimbardo's original experiment never supported the Broken Windows Theory and talks about it as if it were truth. Granted, this chapter is also one in which he cites Charles Murray and Francis Fukuyama, so I can't be surprised he's a fan of it.

In terms of history, he has never engaged with anything beyond what little he seems to have learned from coffee table books (which he even explicitly points to as his inspiration for a chapter on torture). We knew in 2011 that the use of the Iron Maiden and similar contraptions, like the Virgin of Nuremberg, were largely believed to be myth because we could find no contemporary evidence of their use... just a lot of things from later historical periods after that claimed it existed or was used. Pinker doesn't even bring this up.

Concept seems cool, but some writing feels really obnoxious in some regards. Like, lower-class vampires are really being used as as an allegory for some kind of marginalised demographic, and I'm guessing... queerness? Though it also sometimes seems to be race... But overwhelmingly, it's giving me a vibe of "any," but queerness comes to mind with the fact that two non-vampires are running a teahouse that also caters for vampires and creates a "safe space" for them to be themselves (like gay bars) and profiting off them. While it also does a lot of anti-colonial writing? And it hasn't really hit any notes to point out that this is an inherent contradiction?

Also, I'm kind of tired of the "we'll get ours" kind of stories that end up with people working simultaneously within the system and outside of it, since the former seems to be the most important and receives the most focus, not the actions outside the system (which also get written off as "I know it's bad but also we need to").

Also, after six or so chapters, it keeps doing perspective switches between two characters who are mostly in the same place, and that's... weird? Because other than the two chapters where, so far, they haven't been in the same place... The writing between two perspectives has been near identical? Like, I at least expect some slight differences between Arthie and Jin's points of views, but they seem like they may as well be the same person when they're in the same place.

This book, had its author not been marketed as "The Japanese Stieg Larsson," would've been... Well, it would've been okay, and I would've left it with some of the same complaints. But I felt them more strongly because what I'd been primed for was met in the worst of ways possible, in a way that wasn't at all in line with the point of Stieg Larsson's original trilogy.

There are too few books that deal with abused women, especially abused women who actually succeed despite everything. There are too few books that even engage with the concept of killing your local rapist (or abuser) and what that can possibly mean. There are too few books that engage with the internal struggle of someone who has done that to save themselves (especially in a situation where it wasn't intentional) and actually engaged with what it meant.

This book isn't that, but based on the summary and the use of the name 'Stieg Larsson'... And then based on the opening... That was the book I that I expected.

That was not what I got.

Without spoiling it for others, I hate the ending. I hate the solution, I hate how 'Detective Galileo' (a physicist) is used, I hate the friendship between him and the actual detective, and I hate the message that it sends without doing any of the fucking work for what it delivers. There were so many elements that could've been interestingly used and still supported the characters who had suffered the abuse of the victim. Higashino did none of that, and I just...

He is not The Japanese Stieg Larsson. I don't want anyone to be Stieg Larsson of anywhere, but if that were a mantle that could be passed on? Higashino could not take it because the point of his book did not at all engage with the true forms of abuse that his characters endured and felt like they would endure.

I especially hate that this book could actually properly focus on Yasuko and Misato (a mother and daughter), but he makes it all about Ishigami and his internal thoughts. This man, this man who was going to further harass and manipulate Yasuko and Misato... Who took advantage of their situation... And then committed his own heinous crime... And Yasuko being forced to understand what his "love" for her actually looked like and forced to feel guilty for decisions beyond her own control... And some flippant use of suicide for Misato...

The more that I think about it, the more I find reasons for disliking something that could've actually been interesting. I genuinely hate this, and I hate that it's being marketed as if it's in line with the point and purpose of Stieg Larsson's novels (and it's the fact that it's not actually engaging with the abuse of the characters that makes me so upset; Larsson is a symbol, as this marketer utilises them).