You know, 100 years ago, you didn't even have pencil and paper. You chalk and a personal slate. Kids learned advanced physics with that.

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The spirit of your comment is true, although my great-grandfather was an aerospace engineer, and when he was in school 100 years ago, he definitely had paper and pens.

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But it is worth noting that education itself has changed to reflect technological developments. Kids 200 years ago were taught advanced memorization techniques that allowed them to learn effectively without using a lot of paper.

When paper became cheap, we gradually stopped teaching these skills. Or more precisely, we stopped teaching these skills to *everyone.* Specialization is the hallmark of human advancement - it is not necessarily the death of knowledge.

(There's a cool book called Moonwalking with Einstein about the last niche enthusiasts who still learn classical memory techniques.)

In the ancient past, specialization meant that a few farmers could make food for the whole village, freeing people to think about things other than their next meal. Today, we have layer upon nested layer of esoteric specialization. In the case of physics, it was very important for my ex-soviet physics profs to have exceptional command of integration techniques. Those integration techniques are sill very important - but now it only takes one mathematician to prove the technique, thanks to software that can implement them automatically. Today's burgeoning physicists are free to contemplate other things.

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Yes, there are techniques and skills that can allow people to make do without modern conveniences. But it turns out modern conveniences contribute to human progress precisely by allowing most of us to forget how to stalk buffalo, freeing out time and effort for higher pursuits.