Comment by 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.
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.
Like most social breakthroughs, this was coincident with a major technological breakthrough: the invention of the printing press.
[flagged]
1 reply →
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.
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.
6 replies →
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.
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.