Your quote from the Encyclopedia Brittanica is even more absurd and outrageous than the original article. They can't even get the right chronological order between the Renaissance and the Reformation. Clue: the Renaissance era began at least 100 years before the Reformation. So it's ridiculous to make unsubstantiated statements like "The spread of literacy during the Reformation and the Renaissance."
I hope you're not going to claim that Luther was responsible for inventing movable type, although one could get that impression from this brain-dead Britannica piece. And I don't think you would want either to support the claim that "the adoption of vernacular languages in place of Latin" facilitated literacy. This is such a vacuous statement that one doesn't know where to begin to criticize it (kind of like the article on women and the reformation). the adoption of the vernacular for what? everday conversation? in the liturgy? in universities? Directly contrary to this stupidity, wasn't it true that the main emphasis of education in protestant countries like England continued to focus almost exclusively on the study of Latin and Greek well into the 20th century? And wasn't the demarcation point for our decline into decadent ignorance marked by the abandonment of classical studies?
Compulsory schooling, established in Britain, Europe, and the U.S. in the 19th century, has led to high rates of literacy in the modern industrialized world.
More ignorant propaganda for the leviathan state that I'm surprised you would want to be associated with. The documented fact is that literacy rates in the United States were HIGHER in 1850 than they are today, back before Horace Mann and his program to brainwash all American children.
| Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxi + 794 pp. Table of contents, preface, bibliographic index and general index. $54.95 (paper), ISBN 0-521-29955-1 |
The use of this new technology produced unexpected results. How the differing reactions to the changes brought about by printing shaped subsequent European society is most clearly seen in Eisenstein's extended discussion of the role print culture played in shaping religious debates before and after the Protestant Reformation. There had been many earlier heretical movements within the Catholic Church before Luther's posting of his 95 theses. But the dissemination and greater permanence of print culture allowed his challenge to have a much greater impact. Moreover, the competitive nature of the printing industry, which was driven by a desire for sales, provided a new, more public outlet for controversies, and insured that what began as a scholarly dispute between theologians gained an international audience. Reformation impulses and the printing industry fed off and accelerated one another in an age where religious materials were popular sellers.
Differing Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards print culture resulted in two widely divergent historical paths. In Protestant lands, approval of vernacular bibles led to encouragement of greater lay literacy and a closer tying of biblical lore with developing national cultures. In Eisenstein's view, the differences in Catholic and Protestant reactions to printing were not due solely to theological differences, or to Protestants being more enlightened or trusting of their congregations. Some individual Protestant leaders were hostile to the changes wrought by printing, particularly the wider dispersal of controversial books to lay audiences. But areas under Protestant control were generally less able to implement censorship of the presses than the more centralized governments of Catholic areas. One of the most important events in the shaping of early print culture was the successful rebellion of the Netherlands. In their small, semi-autonomous provinces, numerous printing presses sprang up that operated relatively free of censorship, and provided an outlet for authors, even within areas held by the Counter-Reformation. Books coming off the clandestine presses proved impossible for the Counter-Reformation to block, with significant impact for both religion and science.
Yep, up until the 1960's. Most colleges still had language requirements, and many programs for PhD and the like required the mastery of Latin and Greek (and also modern languages).