Re: Heads-up: Possible Televisual Recovery
- From: TimC <tconnors@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 11:32:42 +1100
On 2007-11-02, Robert Uhl (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
Jasper Janssen <jasper@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:59:00 -0600, Robert Uhl <eadmund42@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
In fairness, literacy rates were higher before compulsory public
education than after it and road maintenance was an old common-law
duty for those who lived along them.
And, in fairness, only the people that lived along them actually
*used* those roads, unlike today.
??? They were used as much and as little as roads today.
As for the first claim.. cite?
<http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm>: "Looking back,
abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to
show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States
was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According
to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was
illiterate and you probably don?t want to know, not really, what people
in those days considered literate; it?s too embarrassing. Popular
novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in
1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10
million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find
yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners,
politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed
in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and
well-educated reader can handle it nowadays."
I'm always wary of measurement processes that have changed. You're
looking at literature that have survived there. What's the point of
keeping tabloid media around for future generations to see what we
read?
One in 579 were illiterate, or one in 579 were able to get someone to
fill in the census for them when they couldn't read the census
material? The rest just didn't get counted at all?
There's always been poor people. Poor people tend to be uneducated
and hence, illiterate. Not least because they can't afford a library
of books to read. How many slaves did that state have then?
--
TimC
I've found that very little humour can be squeezed into 64 chara
-- Screwtape
.
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