Robert, Where do you get these misconceptions! We had a perfectly literate country before 1852? Women were not educated. It was a crime to educate slaves. The poor did not get educated in most communities. Illiteracy was rife. You've also taken Socrates seriously out of context. He was speaking in a culture in which literacy was limited to the elite. Athens was a strictly statified society in which the lower classes were educated only if those in the upper classes wanted a particular person educated. Further, his criticism was aimed at the Sophists, not at teachers in the sense we think of them. These were people who were paid as long as they pleased their employer, and they didn't teach in anything like what we would consider schools. Herb Stahlke <<< [log in to unmask] 12/12 9:59p >>> 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<br clear=all><hr>Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : <a href="http://explorer.msn.com">http://explorer.msn.com</a><br></p> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/