d:\doc\web\2002\11\histlit.txt


At 06:16 PM 11/3/2002 -0600, Carol Holst wrote:


1. Were our pioneer ancestors really better educated than people are
now? How do we prove our conclusions either way?


Standardized test results are available beginning with the World War I
generation. It's clear that students today are better, on the whole,
than Americans were 80 years ago at the things those tests can
measure.


For earlier generations it is difficult to obtain a representative
sample. Preserved writing samples tend to be from the relatively
wealthy, and of course can tell us little about the prevalence of
absolute illiteracy. Still, even a cursory survey of letters from the
Civil War shows that the standard of spelling today is much higher
than it was then. Or peruse, if you will, the journals of Lewis and
Clark.


For anyone seriously interested in the literacy of earlier generations
of Americans, I recommend a book by Miles Meyers, Changing Our Minds:
Negotiating English and Literacy, published by the National Council of
Teachers of English, Urbana, Illinois, 1996.


Miles demonstrates that the definition of literacy (and thus, what
schools have attempted to teach) has changed dramatically in the
course of American history. As he documents, instructional objectives
have been determined by social and economic conditions.


The titles of some of his chapters outline earlier meanings of "literacy" in America: 
·       From Oracy (or Face-to-Face Literacy) to Signature Literacy: 1660-1776); 
·       Signature and Recording Literacy: 1776-1864; 
·       Recitation and Report Literacy: 1864-1916; 
·       A Literacy of Decoding, Defining, and Analyzing: 1916-1983; 
·       The Transition to a New Standard of Literacy: 1960-1983; 


He has amassed a great deal of evidence that in the four score and
seven years between the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address most Americans were capable of little more than
signing their name. During the next fifty years, public schools
attempted to assimilate large numbers of immigrants by teaching
students to memorize texts with patriotic and Anglo-Saxon cultural
themes (but not necessarily to "read," in the sense of being able to
look at an unfamiliar text and say what it means). By the time of the
First World War, the Army needed recruits able to read basic
directions. Many could not even read signs and labels, so schools
embarked on a program of teaching reading as decoding.


George Sheridan
Northside School
Cool, California 95614