Note that the link you provided doesn’t even attempt to argue that literacy rates were as high back then as they are now, it acknowledges the opposite.
Funny I don’t recall arguing about that there. I was talking about the literacy of the smart fraction. To quote from the link:
In the extensive NAAL survey, only 13% of adults attained this level. Thus, the proportion of Americans today who are able to understand Common Sense (13%) is smaller than the proportion that bought Common Sense in 1776 (20%).
It seems proportionally more Americans bought Common Sense than could understand it today properly according to the educational metric given. Now people buying material they can’t understand for various reasons isn’t that uncommon and of course the inference we draw from a particular survey may be problematic for various reasons. But the sheer size of the proportion is pretty striking and decent evidence that literacy among clever people was at the very least not much worse than today and was plausibly perhaps even better.
Yes, but he reaches that conclusion on extremely tenuous grounds.
“search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts,” is categorized into four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. Proficient, the highest level, is defined as “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences.” As an example of this level of performance, they cite comparing the viewpoints in two texts. This level seems to be roughly the level required to read Common Sense.
Seems on what basis? You don’t have to be able to make complex inferences to be able to read Common Sense. Ideally, you should be at this reading level in order to make informed opinions based on complicated political texts, but then, you should also be at this level in order to try and parse the Bible, and readership of that certainly isn’t restricted to the ‘Proficient’ category. I can certainly attest that one hundred percent of any of my English classes in high school could have read Common Sense and written an essay on the content, many of them would simply have been uninsightful and full of regurgitated cached thoughts.
Besides, Payne was following the usual standards of writing of his day. Literate people of the time got used to text that was dense and relatively opaque compared to most writing today, because that’s how people were taught to write. Many people in modern audiences can’t parse Shakespeare, and Shakespeare performed for the lower classes of his time, we’ve simply moved past the point when the modes of communication he used were current.
I would not regard this as “decent evidence” that literacy among clever people was at least as high then as today. Peer and political pressure can easily account for people buying a text that’s above their reading proficiency. You could just as easily say that the higher proportions of families today which own their own bibles (books were expensive, many families didn’t have their own, Common Sense was just a pamphlet) means literacy levels today are higher. I would regard this as extremely tenuous evidence on which to claim that “the smart fraction’s actual literacy in systems like that of Colonial America seems to have been better than today anyway.”
You make a potent counterexample with the Bible, upvote.
Besides, Payne was following the usual standards of writing of his day. Literate people of the time got used to text that was dense and relatively opaque compared to most writing today, because that’s how people were taught to write. Many people in modern audiences can’t parse Shakespeare, and Shakespeare performed for the lower classes of his time, we’ve simply moved past the point when the modes of communication he used were current.
I think the difference is at least in part that literacy was more limited, so material made for the lowest common denominator ended up shooting for a higher target than that produced in eras of wider media consumption.
Funny I don’t recall arguing about that there. I was talking about the literacy of the smart fraction. To quote from the link:
It seems proportionally more Americans bought Common Sense than could understand it today properly according to the educational metric given. Now people buying material they can’t understand for various reasons isn’t that uncommon and of course the inference we draw from a particular survey may be problematic for various reasons. But the sheer size of the proportion is pretty striking and decent evidence that literacy among clever people was at the very least not much worse than today and was plausibly perhaps even better.
Yes, but he reaches that conclusion on extremely tenuous grounds.
Seems on what basis? You don’t have to be able to make complex inferences to be able to read Common Sense. Ideally, you should be at this reading level in order to make informed opinions based on complicated political texts, but then, you should also be at this level in order to try and parse the Bible, and readership of that certainly isn’t restricted to the ‘Proficient’ category. I can certainly attest that one hundred percent of any of my English classes in high school could have read Common Sense and written an essay on the content, many of them would simply have been uninsightful and full of regurgitated cached thoughts.
Besides, Payne was following the usual standards of writing of his day. Literate people of the time got used to text that was dense and relatively opaque compared to most writing today, because that’s how people were taught to write. Many people in modern audiences can’t parse Shakespeare, and Shakespeare performed for the lower classes of his time, we’ve simply moved past the point when the modes of communication he used were current.
I would not regard this as “decent evidence” that literacy among clever people was at least as high then as today. Peer and political pressure can easily account for people buying a text that’s above their reading proficiency. You could just as easily say that the higher proportions of families today which own their own bibles (books were expensive, many families didn’t have their own, Common Sense was just a pamphlet) means literacy levels today are higher. I would regard this as extremely tenuous evidence on which to claim that “the smart fraction’s actual literacy in systems like that of Colonial America seems to have been better than today anyway.”
You make a potent counterexample with the Bible, upvote.
I think the difference is at least in part that literacy was more limited, so material made for the lowest common denominator ended up shooting for a higher target than that produced in eras of wider media consumption.