Universal schooling began in the US I'm guessing around the beginning of the civil war. Of course the upper crust was going to school all along, and they are the ones who make history. The unfortunate man with the hoe, since he doesn't know how to write, doesn't leave much of a record for us.
I remember when I was four years old and I used to watch my sister get ready to go to school, and then she'd be there all day, doing god knows what, sitting at a desk, I knew that, and not running around like a free kid having a good time. How terrible. Of course, as siblings do, I made fun of her, and one day she shot back, "Next month, you'll have to go too." I was taken aback. Could this be true? Well my sister said so, and she was older than me so she knew a lot, so it must be. Oh alas and alack.
I don't recall any resistance. Your folks told you had to go and so you had to go. I reckon they were glad to have you out of their hair for six or seven hours, but they also, and I think this was universal, thought it was good for you. Nobody thought readin 'n writin' 'n 'rithmetic were bad for you, nobody thought you were being imbued with sinister ideas by the deep state. (Deep state, there is a term suddenly taking hold. In the sixties my revolutionary ilk just had the establishment, evil, but that was straightforward, unlike the sinister deep state).
I took a break here for internet research. I was looking for something like percent of Americans who were literate by decade, but I couldn't find anything like that, and I guess they didn't take statistics back then. I remember reading Andersonville, a slightly fictionalized story of a horrific southern prison for union soldiers some years ago, and at one point the greys capture a passel of blues and for some reason they ask who among them can read and write and all the union hands go up, and the rebs think they are all funning them because hardly any of the grey can.
Anyway, I had expected to see like 10 percent literate in, oh 1800, and maybe like 70 percent in 1870, but there was nothing that extreme. Instead indications are that Americans were always pretty literate. I remember Tocqueville commenting on being surprised at how knowledgeable the American in the street was.
Well this is all very interesting. When I was in edukashun skool they did teach us the history of public schools in America, but as always when in school, I wasn't paying attention. What I was more interested in than literacy was what effect just spending all those hours together in a classroom where you had to shut up and listen had on society, but surely that requires more actual facts.
Beagles' question about black kids speaking the same in the classroom as they do on the street is interesting. All kids speak differently in the classroom than on the street, but for the black kids I am sure that their classroom english was further from their street english than was the case for white kids. To some extent this good english/bad english thing is a class thing, with the english of the upper class seen as better than that of the lower class.
When I worked at the Chinese restaurant, there were these two older local women who were like managers and they would put up signs for the rules, and invariably there were misspelled words in them, and the waitresses, who were generally college students, would laugh at them. Oh part of it was just making fun of the establishment because these women were older, but part of it was classist.
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