An interesting thing to look at here is the history of literacy in England. Here’s a graph of illiteracy, declining from 90% to 5% (for men) from 1500 to 1900. Of interest is that the compulsory schooling acts—basically the adoption of a system very much like our modern system—happened in 1870, at which point male illiteracy was already down to 20%. So how were 80% of men learning to read before then? Well, the government was subsidizing education starting in about 1830, even though it wasn’t compulsory. But male illiteracy was only 40% then!
The answer seems to be something like: there were schools that people paid for, or they did Sunday school, or they got tutored individually, or they got tutored in small groups, much in the same way that people might learn any other skill now, like art.
An interesting thing to look at here is the history of literacy in England. Here’s a graph of illiteracy, declining from 90% to 5% (for men) from 1500 to 1900. Of interest is that the compulsory schooling acts—basically the adoption of a system very much like our modern system—happened in 1870, at which point male illiteracy was already down to 20%. So how were 80% of men learning to read before then? Well, the government was subsidizing education starting in about 1830, even though it wasn’t compulsory. But male illiteracy was only 40% then!
The answer seems to be something like: there were schools that people paid for, or they did Sunday school, or they got tutored individually, or they got tutored in small groups, much in the same way that people might learn any other skill now, like art.