Is this what you taught you impressionable and gullible students? Geeze!
Well,...Illiteracy was certainly not universal among Catholics with their tuition-free schools.
It was taught to me by impressionable and gullible nuns and priests. And for that teaching my parents paid a pretty penny. If you are suggesting that it would have been better had universal education been provided only to and limited Roman Catholics, I disagree with you. Perhaps you need to go back and read how single-building schools were organized by communities, not governments, in frontier America.