Comment by pj_mukh 4 days ago
I think a better question is: How did the median get so much better over 150 years, and why can't it keep getting better?
150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going? So the outlier, super special "phenom" today is the median of tomorrow.
I was surprised to read this post. Thank you to share. From Wiki, I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
> By 1875, the U.S. literacy rate was approximately 80 percent.
> By 1900, the situation had improved somewhat, but 44% of black people remained illiterate.
> The gap in illiteracy between white and black adults continued to narrow through the 20th century, and in 1979, the rates were approximately equal.> By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today
But the states does have among the lowest literacy rate in the west. Less than 80% was considered literate in 2024, compared to almost 99% in the EU (with a range from 94% to almost 100%).
Success itself could be to blame for the recent reversion.
My read of history is that the puritans basically had universal literacy not that long after the printing press hit Europe. I believe America and Israel are unique among modern countries in being founded by people whose ancestors had achieved universal literacy in the 1500s.
Something like that. They believed it was important that everyone was literate enough to read and understand the Bible themselves, without it being filtered through a historically corrupt Church that engaged in selective representation and interpretation of the Bible for their own manipulative purposes. Basically, they wanted everyone to be able to go to the source to determine what was and wasn’t moral and Christian, instead of relying on assertions by self-interested third parties.
Regardless of if they achieved their religious objectives, that earnest mission to make every human soul capable of reading the Bible for themselves produced the social good of a literate population capable of reading prodigious amounts of non-Bible content.
It is an interesting consequence of how the religious wars in Europe spilled over into in the early Americas.
Like most social breakthroughs, this was coincident with a major technological breakthrough: the invention of the printing press.
I would argue the downside was that this perspective got secularized and morphed into the particularly American paranoid distrust of institutions that has caused at least as many problems as it has solved. In fact, I think the American obsession with homeschooling has those same Puritan roots.
I don't think that's particularly accurate for the US. Perhaps some of the Protestant settler communities were very literate, but I'm quite certain literacy would have been far lower by the time the country was actually founded, as slaves were imported and immigration from other communities picked up.
This seems like a suspiciously bold statement. Both in the assertion that these groups had achieved universal literacy, and in that other groups hadn't been at least as literate. Japan comes to mind, wrt the latter. Literacy, if not universal, was also widespread across the Muslim world.
No offence, but your comment is quite racist.
> literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history;
The rates only looked okay if you cut out at least 20% of thr population?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic...
Yeah, it was okay in New England but many states had laws preventing slave education.
It’s racist to break out statistics along what was literally the single most determinative factor for life outcomes in antebellum America?
No its racist to claim that literacy rates in the States were the highest in the world.
As long as you ignore all those pesky non-whites.
Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling didn’t fix all that. There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications… the list goes on and on and on. Some of these things contributed major improvements to the average person.
Advances in medicine and nutrition, for example, contributed to sharp declines in early childhood mortality and morbidity. Advances in reproductive health care (along with everything else) led to huge declines in birth rates. Smaller families have more resources and attention available for each child.
Other advances had less of an impact but still add up when combined. Widespread access to refrigeration improved nutrition and reduced spoilage, allowing increased consumption of meat. More meat means taller, stronger, healthier children.
On the other hand, schooling hasn’t improved all that much in 150 years. You can find lots of writing samples and old exams for schools from back then. The bigger difference is that children stay in school much longer and have less need to rapidly enter the workforce in order to support the family. This last factor is a product of many of the advances listed above.
> There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications…
You might say that's also a success of the schooling (and higher education) system - unless the people who produced these advances were all home schooled, which I somehow doubt...
Some were. Some would have made major advances whether they'd had a lot of formal schooling or not.
And many who had a lot of schooling learned to repeat, obey and sit still for 12-16 years.
And maybe had less initiative than they were born with. Maybe they learned to not question what they were told.
1. Thomas Edison Minimal formal education; mostly homeschooled by his mother. Edison was a voracious reader and learned through experimentation.
2. The Wright Brothers (Orville and Wilbur Wright) Neither completed high school. They learned through self-study, practical work, and their experiences running a bicycle repair shop.
3. Henry Ford Left school at 15 years old. Ford learned engineering and mechanics by working as an apprentice.
4. Michael Faraday Minimal formal schooling. Faraday worked as a bookbinder and educated himself through books and observation.
5. Benjamin Franklin Left school at age 10 due to financial constraints. Franklin was self-taught, primarily through reading and experimentation.
6. George Eastman Dropped out of school at age 14. Eastman learned accounting and photography on his own.
7. Elisha Otis Had little formal education and learned mechanics and engineering through work experience.
8. R. G. LeTourneau Dropped out of school in the sixth grade. He learned engineering through hands-on work and experimentation.
9. John D. Rockefeller Dropped out of high school to take a business course and learned through practical experience.
10. Philo Farnsworth Learned electronics and physics by reading and tinkering, despite being unable to afford college.
Most scientific advances throughout history prior to about the 1950s were made by people whose education was either informal or private (including apprenticeship). Private tutoring was the predominant mode of formal education (below university level) throughout history.
I have this discussion with my wife who works at a school.
Children are required to be there. The school has to provide them with all manner of opportunities.
On the flip side, the school can't expect anything from the kids other than attendance. They don't really get to expect a certain level of behavior or performance. They can't relegate the bad actors (behavior or performance) away from those who wish to participate fully. Everyone has to be mixed together.
So you give a certain vocal minority that don't care about the education a heckler's veto. They are regularly disruptive and can't be removed.
Nobody has a solution for actually improving that group of student, but there are enough people involved in public education that demand these students be included in the process that they are trying to wreck.
I can not talk for the US, but in Sweden it was schooling. I think Sweden has better literacy rates earlier than the US, but I guess I really should compare this on a state level considering how the US works. I am pretty sure that it is a political goal not an economic one, this is obvious considering US black literacy levels took until 1979 to be comparable to whites. I would like to point out that the Danish nobility discussed but decided against keeping poor and oppressed farmers illiterate in the 18th century, so it is not really an issue of globalization.
>I am pretty sure that it is a political goal not an economic one, this is obvious considering US black literacy levels took until 1979 to be comparable to whites.
I don't follow. 1979 would have been a high point in closing the black/white economic gap in America (partly because of the falling economic prospects of white Americans at the time).
Neglecting black education was a political decision with an economic component, in that it helped support the system of slavery, and later kept jobs that required education segregated. Siphoning tax dollars from black communities to use elsewhere (instead of to support their educational institutions) would be another aspect of this phenomenon.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that.
Illiterate, yes, but likely better at other skills like milking cows and knowing which plants in the forest were edible. Less connected to the global world and culture, yes, but more connected to the hyper local environment around them. I don't know if the schooling "fixed" anything, it just created a new, national or global template for what a human being should be like.
It took way less than 100 years to eradicate illiteracy, and further improvement followed. However, as soon as a system is established, the forces that corrupt that system start acting, finding ways to exploit it to their own advantage. Then, as special interests (politics, unions) take over, the quality stagnates and then decays.
>Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling has fixed all that, and still works just fine. Just not in America, because that country is rapidly self-destructing. Schooling is still working fine in the rest of the world.
>Why can't it keep going?
Because an educated populace is harder for the ultrarich to control and abuse, because an educated populace with free time can revolt against those in power, and because as a consequence of those two things ultrarich conservatives have consolidated ownership of media and used it to defund education and convince the population that funding education is bad.
The irony of saying that while being uneducated enough to think anyone ever “defunded education.” https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/02/do-we-shortch...
This isn't the slam dunk you think it is. The article indicates that money isn't evenly distributed, which explains the conservatives goal with vouchers and charter / private schools.
My SO taught at all 3 kinds of the school in the US, in urban and suburban areas. The pay is bad everywhere, but worst at the non-union schools. Only teachers left have no better options or believe in the religion or cause of teaching, and even they tend to leave such schools the moment they have enough experience or better options. None of this is good for the kids at such schools.
The more affluent schools can afford to hire experts and keep them. I went to a rich(er) high school and had my choice among many specialty electives and advanced placement. My SO attended a highschool that was something between prison and daycare. My friend's private school was a religious indoctrination factory. Home schooled friends were often academical average to great, all socially awkward well into adulthood, and many were taught conspiracies or outright lies as long as it fit their parents "biblical worldview".
Public school was an escape from a cult-like community for me. I'm grateful my parents were too poor to force me into an alternative until I was old enough to refuse.
Incorrect, in most states poor districts receive slightly more funding than affluent ones: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/90586/...
It sounds like you have a beef with how citizens socialize their children into the dominant religion of the society—which is literally considered a human right[1]—and less so with how schools are funded in the U.S.
See Article 18.4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... (“The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.”)
American subgroups that socialize their children into community religious norms are among the most successful. For example, Mormons: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/utahs-economic-ex....
Prohibitions on religious education in public schools—which don’t exist in many developed countries, such as Germany and Sweden—hurts the majority of people who would do better under that system.
You're delusional. Revolt always came from people with an empty stomach, not from the comfortable leisure class.
Plus, an "educated" populace is as easy or maybe even easier to control, it's willpower against all odds that characterizes the truly ungovernable.
The fact that you believe the ultra rich conspire to control and abuse the uneducated shows that you are part of that group of average people parents want their kids to stay away from.
I agree with this and that's why I think social media, mass media and so on exist.
However I'm curious as to why you attribute or limit this to 'conservatives' only. Is this really something exclusive or characteristic of the conservative side? At least where I am from it's the left that's more interventionist in regards to education rather than the right, that interventionism being used to make education more rigid and controlled by a biased government.
And the media is definitely not consolidated, you've got clearly two sides competing at a pretty equal level.
Establishing standards for education and defunding public schools to siphon the funds to churches are not the same thing. Conservatives have been attacking and defunding educational standards and attacking the educated and the concept of education - hence the repeated claims of "liberal bias", the artificial cultural war against university, etc.
And two sides at equal levels? Are you living in 1979? Local media is nearly all Sinclair. All the cable networks are owned by conservatives. Even traditionally liberal newspapers like the Washington Post are owned by rich assholes taking over the editorial board. And social media in the US is now dominated by two literal fascists.
My apologies for not being from (or exclusively referring to) the US of A.
From where I'm from I'd say yes, both sides at equal levels more or less, fairly favoured toward the left, but now changing a wee bit because the left went waaaaay too left.
Europe would now seem to be shifting towards the right at some levels, but from historically (recently at least) being fairly leftist.
Anyway, aren't CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian... overtly left-leaning?
>Anyway, aren't CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian... overtly left-leaning
For CNN and MSNBC, no. Neither was every truly liberal in the global sense (like the Democratic Party, closer to centrist than anything else) and both have started drifting rightward in the last 4 years such that they're now roughly "American Centrist" with a slight left lean i.e. conservative in most of the rest of the world.
And that actually makes sense from a strictly logical point of view. The extremes are the ones who precisely don't want to conform to the status quo imposed by the alleged controlling higher powers.
As purely anecdotical data, where I'm from it's actually the opposite, majority hippies, vegan, alternative/free education advocates, etc, and a minority of mostly morally-concerned non-left-leaning (mainly religious) people, as well as specific cases of children with special needs that simply can't adapt to public education because of external reasons (bullies).
As a matter of fact, the hardcore religious right in my country have their own private education institutions, which are quite powerful themselves.
So even the (non-catholic) Christians who homeschool because of religious and moral convictions end up being moderate/center people trying to move away from both extremes.
You are attacking a strawman. I think most people would agree that public schools 30 years ago were better than public schools 150 years ago. I find it much harder to believe that public schools today are better than they were 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate
Not true in the case of the US, which famously adopted a culture of universal literacy earlier than the rest of the world. By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history; they took literacy very seriously for complicated historical reasons. Their book consumption per capita was also the highest in the world by a very large margin back in those days, which lends evidence.
It may or may not be relevant to your point, but at least in the US the idea that the average person was illiterate is ahistorical. They were the best read population in the world 150 years ago, and took some pride in that.