Robert Reis makes the following assertions about literacy in the US:

You and I are confronted with a great mystery: we had a perfectly literate country before 1852 when, for the first time, we got government schooling shoved down our throats. How we achieved this amazing literacy is wrapped up in the secret that reading, writing and numbers are very easy to learn -- in spite of what you hear from the reading, writing and number establishments.

I am no expert on the nature of literacy in the US, but I do have a passing interesting in the American Civil War.  I recommend to Mr. Reis James McPherson's widely admired one volume history of the American Civil War entitled Battle Cry of Freedom.  In one of the early chapters, McPherson gives some numbers about literacy in 1850s America.  New England had one of the highest literacy rates in the world (over 95% if I recall correctly). It was perhaps rivalled by some parts of Scandanavia.  This literacy rate was NOT achieved by private schools but by widespread well-supported PUBLIC schools.  A point that McPherson makes explicitly.  Moreover, the South, which did not have such a public schooling system had significantly lower literacy rates among the white population.  (Let us ignore the issue of slavery.)

I wonder what Mr. Reis means by "perfectly literate."  In my passing interest on the Civil War, I have read a lot of unedited letters by soldiers who fought on both sides.  Again, I recommed to Mr. Reis another book by McPherson: Cause and Comrades.  The book tries to understand why men fought in the Civil War.  McPherson quotes actual letters these men sent home.  I am not near that book at the present, but in the year 2000 we would consider most of those writers as illiterate.  They do not control the standard conventions of spelling and punctuation.  Moreover, they use dialect constructions that most of the college freshmen I teach would never, never write in a formal paper.

Mr. Reis, you are terribly, terribly ignorant of American cultural history.  Take off your ideological blinders and do some actual research on what you are writing about.  You clearly haven't up to now and your posts here do not help anyone understand the place of grammar in the classroom.

Bob Yates

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