I wonder whether there are not a few wrong assumptions here.  While I'm
no historian and will readily run from having to memorize dates and
numbers, I am fairly certain nonetheless that at 1850 and earlier,
education was geared to the aristocratic and wealthy elite that had the
leisure to devote to studies and to furnishing the mind.  Comparing a
modern broadly based educational system with that system of home tutors
and spoiled rich kids seems not quite fair, I'd think. Suppose you try
to figure in the relative literacy of slaves, indentured servants,
workers, folks just off the boat, etc. at that time.

==Reinhold



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. We aren't in the mess we're in today because we
don't know how to do things right, but because "we" don't want to do
them right. The incredibly profitable school enterprise has deliberately
selected a procedure of literacy acquisition which is pedagogically
bankrupt; thousands of years ago Socrates predicted this would happen if
men were paid for teaching. He said they would make what is easy to
learn seem difficult, and what is mastered rapidly they would stretch
out over a long time.
http://www.oz.net/~baraka/jtg4.htm

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