Then compare it to the communications of our current generation..

kthxbai

not even close.

I am curious why you would think that literacy rates would be lower now than during a time well before public schools were the norm. When education was considered a luxury for a chosen few.

Sure, if we read writings from that era, they are assuredly erudite, well-learned and scholarly. However, you have to consider that those who could read and write at that level were in the minority, were well-monied and well-educated because of their high social position.

the ability to context read. That is to figure out what a word means by whats around it and the sentence it is in. I've seen the lack of this ability throughout my college career and it really is something that I take for granted everyday.

It's seems we've lost the ability to spell, too...The word you want

is "definitely"....There is an entirely different meaning to "defiantly". .

Although there were no specific studies/surveys at that time, the literacy rate in the early the United States (1790 IIRC) is put at or slightly above 90% by historians.

The difference, I think, is that the anti-intellectualism so pervasive now didn't exist then. While few people went to school, almost everybody could read. We were more literate than the British after the revolution, a point of pride I think. There are a ton of sources on the web, or your library if you are old enough to remember those places, if you're interested.

I think I remember seeing this on American Experience - the kids who immigrated West had nothing to do for months and they were taught to read on the trip. The result really pushed up the literacy rate in the US.

living in urban areas.

However, the problem is that it completely discounts slaves; it was forbidden by law to teach a slave to read. In some areas, the slave population reached 40% of the total population making it virtually impossible that the 90% or higher was realistic except in very specific urban areas that had institutionalized learning available for the masses.

However, I will agree that education was a gem in the US's crown as there definitely was a push to provide more universal education.

That gem has apparently either faded or fallen out completely as anti-intellectualism rears its ugly head and education, just like everything else that has built this country up in the past 100-200 years, is being systematically attacked and dismantled.

Compulsory education was not so widespread in those days. It is estimated that even in the 1870s, 20% of the population (including 11% of the white population) were illiterate.

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

I know several people that can't read well enough to actually understand written instructions, their entire thinking process is taken up by the reading with nothing left for understanding what they read..

http://www.caliteracy.org/rates/

functional illiteracy is still in the double digits

Last edited Tue Jul 24, 2012, 08:55 AM - Edit history (1)

were better educated than the average person of today (relatively speaking).

But we don't hear from the great masses who couldn't read or write.

They didn't need to learn advanced science or math, how to use computers, economics, world history, comparative religions, etc.

All they really studied in school was how to read, write and do basic math (and if their parents were wealthy, then classical languages and maybe some art and music as well).

Plus with no TV, X-Box, phones, internet, etc. there wasn't much to do except read and write letters to friends and family.

I remember reading Cicero spent five or six hours a day keeping up with correspondence with friends and family. If we all had to do that, we'd all probably be better letter writers and journal keepers as well.

they weren't lazy.

It was just different.

We learn computers because that's essential to living in today's society. Ok, but how many people today know anything about horses or crops or blacksmithing or any of the thousands of skills necessary to living in the 1800s?

We've just substituted a different set of knowledge.

We'd be helpless and ignorant by 1800 standards just as they'd be helpless and ignorant by 2012 standards.

Additionally most people today don't learn advanced science, math, or history. There are plenty of people who think the Titanic was just a movie.

Most high school graduates today take at least biology and chemistry or physics. Compare the difficulty of learning chemistry with the difficulty of learning farming- it's no comparison (speaking as someone who worked on a farm and studied chemistry).

And far more people in 1800 were illiterate, never mind learning advanced science and math. We just never hear from them.

According to the Flynn effect, IQs having been going up on average 3 points a decade:

"IQ tests are updated periodically. For example, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), originally developed in 1949, was updated in 1974, in 1991, and again in 2003. The revised versions are standardized to 100 using new standardization samples. In ordinary use IQ tests are scored with respect to those standardization samples. The only way to compare the difficulty of two versions of a test is to conduct a study in which the same subjects take both versions. Doing so confirms IQ gains over time. The average rate of increase seems to be about three IQ points per decade in the US on tests such as the WISC."

So someone from 1900 appearing today wouldn't just have a different skill set- they would have an effective IQ of 70. They could probably improve that somewhat with better nutrition and training, but they woud fundamentally still be quite different from us.

I was in a college prep track and took algebra as a twelve year old progressing up to calculus in my senior year. In 1800, they wouldn't have even gotten up to that in math. They spent years learning penmanship, which, while difficult and beautiful, is not the equivalant mental stimulation of learning to use a search engine or basic programming.

If you read Henry Mayhew's or Karl Engel's descriptions of what life was like in the Industrial Revolution it's extremely shocking. Six year olds worked in the mills ten or twelve hours a day. Some of our inner city schools make not be doing such a hot job with the basics, but I bet those kids would run circles around their socio-economic 1850s equivalents.

Have had to do twice as much for equal credit for a long time.

men develop at different rates than women.

Comparing a 15 year old male to a 15 year old female is not an unbiased metric.

Which would easily account for the half point difference found.

Something appears in a headline as a news discovery that I had realized decades ago.

A priori, one would not expect gender to have any influence on intelligence, so the fact that women have tested out lower than men historically has always seemed to me an indicator of bias in the tests. I can disregard "scientific" evidence with the best (or worst) of them. Well, I've always had an extremely low opinion of the IQ test, so my opinion -- if I can glorify a prejudice with that title -- is worth about what anyone else's is.

-- Mal

My sister has a 157 IQ but she still does dumb things.