[berdie]

Perhaps today that is the case. And I despise the people that have co-opted our children.

But I don’t think that started out to be the case. It started out (as most things do) to be a good thing. So we wouldn’t be a nation of illiterates.

[Jan_Sobieski]

If you look at statistics from the 1800s, our literacy rate was higher then, than today. The architects of our public school system, Horace Mann and John Dewey, were socialists progressives committed to creating a social engineering factories. They successfully created a public-school system like the one they admired in Prussia (Germany), replete with goose stepping children committed to following all government instruction. Mann and Dewey considered public education a religion, with a holy mission to mold children and society.

To do this, it was essential to removing parents' influence over their children. Mann put it this way: "We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause." In his "Pedagogic Creed" of 1897, Dewey wrote, "Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth..."

[SandwicheGuy]

Read the letters home from the soldiers, both sides, in the Civil War. That will disabuse you of any notion you have about our forbears being illiterate. Our nation prospered with one room schools, where the more advanced students taught the younger students, and it worked well until the government started meddling.Since then it has been all downhill. But we were a quite literate nation back then.