Doing a quick google search showed that literacy rates were close to 90% at the time of the Revolutionary War, well before the public school system was established. I believe that it is more than it is today and if what I saw in college when I went back is any indication, it isn't that high these days. If that represents what we call literate enough to get into college, this country is in deep doo-doo.
Please, don't insult my intelligence by drawing lines of comparison between societies nearly three centuries apart.
You want to go back to live in Revolutionary times?
Want to compare the infant mortality rates between Revolutionary America and today?
How about the number of people who died from diseases that may not even exist today?
It would have taken two hundred years for an individual alive during the American Revolution to absorb the same amounts of information that today's children process in one year.
What just took you seconds to research via Google, woud have taken researchers of the time months if not years.
We do not live during te time of the American Revolution, we live today.