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.
If they could achieve that high of a literacy rate with those adverse conditions they had, it speaks very highly of them. If the Declartion of Independence is any example of the general intelligence level of the people of that time, then yes, let's get back to it. Not to mention any other historical documents, speeches, and literature produced in that era. That kind of quality is sorely lacking today.