Comment by jandrewrogers

Comment by jandrewrogers 4 days ago

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> 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.

throwaway2037 4 days ago

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.
And:

    > By 1900, the situation had improved somewhat, but 44% of black people remained illiterate.
And:

    > The gap in illiteracy between white and black adults continued to narrow through the 20th century, and in 1979, the rates were approximately equal.
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mzi 4 days ago

> 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%).

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  • ch4s3 4 days ago

    Of the 20% of US adults who don't have a level of literacy necessary to be considered "literate", 40+% are from other countries with low levels of literacy.

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  • ToDougie 4 days ago

    Wrong signal. The problem is demographic. Not being mean, just a fact that a lot of people are illiterate live in the US, but were not born and raised here.

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  • asimpletune 4 days ago

    Success itself could be to blame for the recent reversion.

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toasterlovin 4 days ago

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.

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  • jandrewrogers 4 days ago

    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.

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    • robertlagrant 4 days ago

      Like most social breakthroughs, this was coincident with a major technological breakthrough: the invention of the printing press.

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    • throw4847285 4 days ago

      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.

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      • ch4s3 4 days ago

        I think you can more readily and correctly connect the American distrust of institutions first to the treatment of the colonists by the British Empire, and later to immigration of people fleeing authoritarian countries. One also cannot dismiss the distrust in authority among put upon minorities. The British Empire was no less brutal in its American colonies than in other places.

        The Puritans were always few in number and were demographically displaced by later immigration around the fishing industry in New England.

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  • acjohnson55 4 days ago

    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.

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  • jkolio 4 days ago

    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.

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elcritch 4 days ago

> and less connected to the world around them.

Sounds like Americans were literate back then. I also suspect that most were _more_ connected to the world around them. Not the broader world, but the immediate world around them.

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happymellon 4 days ago

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.

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  • intuitionist 4 days ago

    It’s racist to break out statistics along what was literally the single most determinative factor for life outcomes in antebellum America?

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    • happymellon 4 days ago

      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.

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      • quacked 3 days ago

        Unless the original commenters sneak-edited their comment, they included the word "whites" specifically to not ignore the non-whites and point out that universal literacy was not "universal" in the early US.

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