An Education Timeline
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According to this guy, we are a lot less literate than we were 200, or even 100 years ago.
Long article, but you'll get the gist in the first few paragraphs - tl;dr.
An American Education Timeline
In the same way, our nation went from almost no professional educators (outside of colleges, at least) prior to 1848 to very near 100% professional educators by 1950. What I mean: prior to the opening of the first state-controlled compulsory age-segregated graded classroom school in 1848, very few teachers were formally trained in teaching. The Normal School, which became teacher colleges, were mostly but a gleam in their fathers’ eyes at that time; the typical teacher was just somebody who would take the job – a college grad if the school, usually in a city, had money; but more often than not, at least in the one-room schools in which most Americans were educated, some teenage product of those one-room schools who needed a job.
By 1900, about half of all students went to ‘consolidated’ schools, but about half still went to one-room schools. By 1950, virtually every public school was staffed by graduates of teacher colleges, while Catholic schools – by far the largest system outside the state schools – tried to hire ‘qualified’ teachers or get teacher-college training for their staff. Catholic schools all wanted to be public schools, at least on the structural, classroom, and training side. This trend continues today.
So: we should expect the basic markers of education – literacy and numeracy – to increase as the professionalism of the educators increased, just as we would expect health, using the markers ‘staying alive’ and ‘staying out of the hospital’, to increase with the spread of flu shots.
But education, as measured by literacy and numeracy, did not increase over the 100 years from 1850 to 1950. Quite the contrary. Here’s an example:
The imbecility of her military leaders abroad, and the fatal want of energy in her councils at home, had lowered the character of Great Britain from the proud elevation on which it had been placed by the talents and enterprise of her former warriors and statesmen. No longer dreaded by her enemies, her servants were fast losing the confidence of self-respect. In this mortifying abasement, the colonists, though innocent of her imbecility, and too humble to be the agents of her blunders, were but the natural participators. They had recently seen a chosen army from that country, which, reverencing as a mother, they had blindly believed invincible—an army led by a chief who had been selected from a crowd of trained warriors, for his rare military endowments, disgracefully routed by a handful of French and Indians, and only saved from annihilation by the coolness and spirit of a Virginian boy, whose riper fame has since diffused itself, with the steady influence of moral truth, to the uttermost confines of Christendom. A wide frontier had been laid naked by this unexpected disaster, and more substantial evils were preceded by a thousand fanciful and imaginary dangers. The alarmed colonists believed that the yells of the savages mingled with every fitful gust of wind that issued from the interminable forests of the west. The terrific character of their merciless enemies increased immeasurably the natural horrors of warfare. Numberless recent massacres were still vivid in their recollections; nor was there any ear in the provinces so deaf as not to have drunk in with avidity the narrative of some fearful tale of midnight murder, in which the natives of the forests were the principal and barbarous actors. As the credulous and excited traveler related the hazardous chances of the wilderness, the blood of the timid curdled with terror, and mothers cast anxious glances even at those children which slumbered within the security of the largest towns. In short, the magnifying influence of fear began to set at naught the calculations of reason, and to render those who should have remembered their manhood, the slaves of the basest passions. Even the most confident and the stoutest hearts began to think the issue of the contest was becoming doubtful; and that abject class was hourly increasing in numbers, who thought they foresaw all the possessions of the English crown in America subdued by their Christian foes, or laid waste by the inroads of their relentless allies.
James Fenimore Cooper, the Last of the Mohicans, 1827 (The ‘Virginian boy’ is Washington)
And so on, for several hundred pages. In 1826, this book was a smash best seller, the Harry Potter of its day, only more so, read by young and old. Yet in 1826, there were no compulsory state-funded schools. People learned to read in slapdash ways, famously out of the King James Bible on grandmother’s knee. But read they could!
I bet your average American college student would think it a slog, or even nigh unreadable. Cooper’s long sentences, nested clauses, adventurous vocabulary are likely to prove difficult. But they were not too difficult for Americans 200 years ago.
30 years earlier, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, full of historical and classical references, were published in popular newspapers – and hundreds of thousands of people read them and talked about them. Papers in those days were not written to a 6th grade reading level, yet many, many people read them.
Excepting slaves, the population of America was by all evidence as literate in the 1820s as it ever got. In 1835, Tocqueville wrote about seeing farmers sitting under trees in their fields, reading Descartes (I think) while resting their plow horses.
The evidence – these, and many more similar examples – suggests a very high level of literacy in America prior to any compulsory schooling.
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We had one of the first in my home town.
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Times change. I dont know if it is a decrease in literacy, but a change in literacy.