How Colonial America’s Literacy Rates Shaped the Revolution

And why America has failed so miserably at teaching literacy ever since.

Revolutionary-era America was an unusual place: unusually rebellious, unusually galvanized, unusually democratic, and perhaps most importantly, unusually literate.

When the fifty-six delegates of the Continental Congress adopted and eventually signed the Declaration of Independence in the sweltering heat of a Philadelphia summer, they may have shown exceptional levels of bravery, but they were not special compared to their fellow civilians in their literacy skills. When copies of the Declaration of Independence were sent around the colonies that July – roughly 200 of them, known as Dunlap Broadsides, distributed on horseback to governors and military commanders – most average citizens could read them.

Among the white male population (the idea of civil rights and equality among the genders and races – arguably fueled by the democratic ability to read and write – wouldn’t sweep the West for nearly another hundred years), 70 percent were literate.

In New England that number was even higher. Roughly 80 percent of adult men could read, and estimates place the female literacy rate somewhere between 45 and 67 percent.

A modern reader, raised on public schools and the assumption that every American can read as a birthright, might not be impressed. But that number is actually equivalent to America’s literacy rates today: 21 percent of the American adult population is still functionally illiterate, despite nearly a trillion dollars of annual spend and up to thirteen years of legally-mandated school attendance.

Colonial America’s high literacy rate was shocking for its time – arguably a cause, not just a correlation, of the Revolutionary War and the innovative society that followed.

In the 1770s, England only had a 40 percent literacy rate among its adult male population. Most of Catholic Europe hovered at or well below a 30 percent literacy rate. In fact, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Sweden were the only European countries that compared to American colonial literacy levels.

The American colonies’ high literacy rate was driven, not by aristocratic schooling or government mandates, but by Protestant theology, which believed every Christian was personally responsible before God for understanding and abiding by scripture, and therefore needed to be able to read their own Bible.

That bent towards literacy was further enforced by the egalitarian landowning structure of the colonies. In Europe, most land was entangled in a feudal system where it was controlled by nobility, and the laboring population was comprised of tenants who had no hope of landownership, which also meant they had no use for signing contracts, reading documents, or any other written accoutrements of property.

The American land economy was radically different, structured around land grants and private ownership, and immigrant farmers and their descendants had ample opportunity to become landowners themselves. Many did, and the responsibilities that came along with ownership necessitated reading contracts, managing accounts, and signing documents. Reading became an imperative frontier skill, and families acquired it and passed it on to their children.

This was fundamentally different from anything that had occurred in the West, at least since the time of Ancient Athens (a landholding society with a similar need for literacy, although estimates of literacy rates vary wildly). For most of European history, literacy was an exclusive skill, preserved mostly for the ruling class and the clergy. Even the nobility were mostly illiterate, and relied on the clergy to handle written matters. Books were hand-copied, expensive, rare, and controlled mostly by the Church.

Then Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440. Suddenly books were accessible, and dropped to a fraction of their former cost, and could be mass produced. With books available to the public, literacy rates in Europe began to steadily rise. But a minuscule literacy rate in the 1400s meant a still-very-small literacy rate in the 1700s.

The advent of the printing press was also a key catalyst that sparked the rise of the Protestant Reformation, the first great theological fracturing of the Roman Catholic Church (driven in part by people who could read their own Bibles), which began the long years of religious persecution that eventually made the blood, sweat, toil, and possible death required to populate the American continent a desirable prospect.

The entire American experiment was the offspring of the printing press, which begat the Protestant faith that drove hundreds of thousands of religious refugees to America, which in turn begat a highly-literate landholding populace with strong incentives to protect their freedoms – which made nearly inevitable a Revolution and a governmental experiment which would have been neither tenable nor desirable if the populace couldn’t read.

That inception of the American experiment sparked what has become 250 years and counting of debate on how the American populace should be educated.

It’s been a contentious topic ever since.

One of the most interesting parts of the whole American colonial story is that an entire population of primarily low-class immigrants and subsistence farmers maintained literacy rates that were in their own right revolutionary and which, to this day, large educational systems with the full weight of government behind them struggle to surpass. American culture was clearly good – far better than most of its counterparts – at cultivating a literate society. And in the absence of any governmental structures involved in education, it was a cultural accomplishment, not a bureaucratic one.

In early post-Revolutionary America, education – both in literacy and in other disciplines – continued much as it had before: independent, decentralized, localized, largely parent-enforced, structured around values and necessity. But “structured around necessity” does not mean “basic.” The populace that could read did so at levels far exceeding those of the average American high school graduate today.

One could object that colonial “literacy” meant the ability to sign your name, not the comprehension standard reading is measured by today. But the book sales of the era and the required reading levels to consume those books tell a different story.

Take as example Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, which reportedly sold over 100,000 copies in its first three months alone, to a population of 2.5 million. Common Sense is not light reading, and includes such words as “timorous,” “consanguinity,” “extirpate,” and “pecuniary” – at least one of which nearly every college graduate you know today would likely have to look up. And yet, Paine was writing in intentionally “plain language” compared to the average political pamphlet of the era. He wrote Common Sense for the ordinary farmer and tradesperson, not the educated class, which in itself illustrates how much higher the literacy baseline in colonial America was than it is today.

There were some regional government attempts at enforcing educational standards, predating even the Revolution – for example, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a literacy mandate in 1642 that required parents to ensure their children could read, and authorized towns to fine them if they could not. Five years later, Massachusetts went a step further and passed the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647 (aimed at stopping the “Old Deluder,” Satan, from using illiteracy to keep people from the word of God), which required all towns of 50 or more families to hire a schoolmaster, and towns of 100 or more families to establish a grammar school.

But all such attempts at enforcing education were localized, when they existed at all – left in the hands of local governments and the local populaces they were responsible for and answered to. And none of the laws mandated actual school attendance.

It wasn’t until 1852 that the first state passed a compulsory attendance law – Massachusetts again – requiring children ages 8-14 to attend school at least three months per year. By 1885, sixteen states had compulsory attendance laws in place, with varying levels of attendance standards, but all of these were poorly enforced.

These early compulsory attendance laws were not in response to dropping literacy rates. Literacy was improving on its own before compulsion arrived. Between 1800 and 1840, white literacy in the north rose from roughly 75 percent to as high as 97 percent; literacy in the South rose from 55 percent to 81 percent over the same period. The 1840 federal census, the first to track literacy, reported that 91.5 percent of adult white Americans were literate – including women.

Even among the enslaved population of the South, where slaves were legally prohibited from learning to read, an estimated 10 percent (up to 20 in some regions) of the enslaved population achieved literacy anyway, a remarkable statistic for its time.

This was twelve years before the first compulsory school attendance law. Literacy in America was already well on its way to being universal, a problem that had been solved.

The shift towards compulsory education – and the drive towards a standardized curriculum – came instead as a response to immigration and industrialization. In the first century of the American Experiment, the civic ideal was a literate population that could govern itself, and privatized and localized schooling effectively accomplished that aim. But as immigrants from a widening array of countries swarmed America’s shores, and as large industrializing interests needed increasingly uniform and interchangeable bodies on the factory floor, pressure mounted to produce assimilated workers who could function in an industrial economy.

The challenge of assimilating immigrants into American life began building in the 1840s and 1850s, a span which saw what was at the time the largest voluntary migration in recorded history. Between 1846 and 1856, 3.1 million immigrants arrived on American shores, equal to one-eighth of the entire American population at the time.

It’s not coincidental that Massachusetts – a primary immigration hub – passed its first compulsory attendance law during that period. The Massachusetts state legislature described the incoming Irish immigrants (1.5 million crossing the Atlantic between 1845 and 1855, driven by the famine) in a report as “Those now pouring in upon us, in masses of thousands upon thousands, [who] are wholly of another kind in morals and intellect.”

The development of public schools was deemed necessary for instilling American values into a young and often foreign-born populace. And in urban centers with entrenched divides (New York, Boston, and Providence were each filled with bitter social divides between Catholics and Protestants, and had segregated communities of immigrants), public schools’ explicit directive was to homogenize the populace and make everyone standardly American.

At the same time, the economy was rapidly changing. Urbanization and the rise of the factory changed the needs of the workforce. The ideal American became less the independent and libertarian farmer, more the specialized and collectivist factory worker. The design of public school, with its factory-like structure and segmentation of students into “types” and “aptitudes,” was created to mold children into that industrial labor ideal.

Some groups were so adamantly against the rising public school structure that they built their own parallel schools – like the Amish, who maintained their one-room primary-grade schoolhouses, or the Catholics, who built parochial schools as an explicit rebellion against public school’s Protestant bias. But those alternative paths were firmly “minority” and “other”: the track towards socialized education was well entrenched.

In 1918, Mississippi became the last state to pass a compulsory school attendance law. Although attendance enforcement across most states remained weak well into the 1930s, and many children (or entire families) played hooky, the cultural norms around education had firmly shifted: parents sent their children to school to learn how to read, and public school was part of the fabric of American life.

Over this period of emerging compulsory education laws, literacy rates still continued to rise, which public schools congratulated themselves for – although given the literacy trends prior to the inception of public schools, the extent of schools’ role as causation or mere correlation is up for debate.

The literacy rate of minority groups, immigrants, and the poor began to rise to meet the levels previously only held by free white American-born citizens, which education policy advocates celebrated as their greatest success. But again, the role of public school and the role of other social pressures in this story deserves to be untangled. The period of standardizing schools also saw a large amount of social change: the Civil War, emancipation, and eventually the Civil Rights movement, all while the cheapening of books and the increasing prominence of reading materials in day-to-day life (mailers, flyers, street signs, menus, instruction manuals) made reading a more accessible and a more necessary skill.

Remember, the engine that drove literacy in the colonial era was self-interest – subsistence farmers carving time from their exhausting days, often with no reading materials besides the family Bible. As landownership expanded to other groups, so too did the incentive to read – and their literacy rates followed.

Throughout the 20th century, as is true of nearly every bureaucratic system in all of history, public schools became bigger and continually more standardized. Small regional schools conglomerated into larger integrated school districts. State-level mandates superseded district-level authority, and slowly the federal government got more and more involved. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act brought federal funding into public education on the district level, and although the act explicitly avoided setting federal curriculum standards, the federal government’s role in delivering and protecting American education became more and more expected: until, in the early 21st century, when test scores were plummeting across the board and students nationwide were struggling, it was obviously the federal government’s job to fix it.

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education under President Reagan warned in its report “A Nation at Risk,” that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” This came as a response in part to America’s literacy rates, which began flatlining in the early 1970s. Despite more money and more resources being poured into education, reading scores stopped improving, which caused understandable alarm, considering the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent annually on education and the importance of a literate populace in a civil society.

Reagan’s report led to a focused effort on fixing reading comprehension scores, which improved for a while – although it’s worth noting that Thomas Paine-level words like “inveterate” and “remissness” and “prepossession” weren’t part of the high school vocabulary – but in the 1990s and the early 2000s scores began dropping again.

By this time the perception of the government’s role in public education had been fully cemented, and it was the federal government who stepped in with two large curriculum interventions: 2001’s No Child Left Behind and 2010’s Common Core, both of which pushed towards a single national standard that positioned Washington as the de facto arbiter of curricula. From the early 2000s onward, federally-set standards dictated what every teacher should teach to every child at every grade level, with everything from funding to continued employment tied to an individual’s compliance. The academic curriculum was standardized to the point that the only difference between a high school in Colorado and a high school in Alabama might be the view out the windows and the colors of the football team.

Those interventions didn’t work. Reading scores have continued to drop in the following decades, at the most alarming rate in American history. Between 2017 and 2023, adults scoring at the lowest literacy levels increased by nine percentage points. Reading levels for struggling students are now lower than they were in 1971, the year that first sparked the alarm that resulted in five decades of focused intervention. Twelfth graders are graduating high school unable to read. Parents who thought their elementary schoolers had learned to read were shocked to discover that their students had only memorized the words and couldn’t actually read at all. 21 percent of the American adult population is functionally illiterate, and 54 percent read at or below a sixth-grade level.

The resulting conclusion is hard to ignore: the period of highest government involvement in education has produced the worst results.

Even with compulsory public school attendance, even with a nearly $1 trillion annual spend on K-12 education in America, even with entire federal and state departments devoted to the task, the modern system produces an 80% adult literacy rate – roughly the same figure the colonial period achieved with no budget, no government oversight, and no infrastructure, no compulsory attendance, no enforced teacher standards or training, among a population that included people with every reason not to read and no one forcing them to.

American colonists learned to read because it was in their best interests to be literate: personally, financially, politically, and spiritually. Communities were incentivized to teach their children to read and did so effectively, long before any local or federal government got involved.

At best, the modern system is producing roughly the same outcome as the entirely decentralized and anarchistic education approach of the colonial era, which cost the government approximately $0 to run – although it’s an open question how many high school graduates today would be able to read Thomas Paine.