Comment by mariusor
5 months ago
"until very recently" includes pre-industrial times to my understanding when education did not exist in an organized fashion for the poor.
[edit] And in what world is Abraham Lincoln considered "the poor" for his times? I am sure you can come up with some less fortunate people during the same times which didn't really get the experience of that one room schoolhouse.
Illinois had universal free public school since 1825, so no, you couldn’t find anyone who didn’t have access to that experience (or better).
The world is quite a lot bigger than Illinois though.
And it seems I need to spell it out for you, right there in the US during the same times, children of black people in the south didn't get access to education[1]. Serfdom was a thing in Europe until the early 1900, serfs children didn't get access to proper education[2]. I'm giving you a link to Russian education, but the whole of Eastern Europe was at a similar level. I don't know what kind of rose tinted cool aid you guys have been drinking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_during_the_slave_per...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire#Education
Well, the topic was Lincoln and his contemporaries. The north in America generally provided free, universal public education.
Places like the South that didn't want to do that found themselves on the receiving end of losing a war, and now it's universal across all of America.
> And in what world is Abraham Lincoln considered "the poor"
In the world where he was born on the frontier in a log cabin, which is this one.
Yet that is heaps more privilege than black slaves and native tribes had at the same time. Is that really not obvious to you?