The Transformation of the World (170 page)

2 Literacy and Schooling

One of the most important cultural processes of the nineteenth century was the spread of mass literacy. Having begun centuries earlier in many societies, and developing now at a highly uneven regional or local pace, it should not be too hastily attributed to other basic processes such as state building, the growth of confessionalism or a science society, or even industrialization.
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One can argue at length about the precise meaning of “literacy,” the spectrum of which runs from the ability to sign a marriage certificate to regular reading of religious texts to active involvement in public literary life. The crux of the matter is clear, however: literacy is a cultural technique of reading (and secondarily writing) that makes it possible to participate in communicative circles wider than those of face-to-face speech and hearing. Someone who is able to read becomes a member of a translocal public. This also opens up new opportunity for manipulating and being manipulated. By 1914 the male population of Europe had attained such a degree of literacy that soldiers on all sides could read weapon instruction manuals, absorb the propaganda that warmongers wrote for them, and keep their family posted with news from the front. The scope and scale of the Great War is hardly imaginable without comprehensive literacy.

The Trends in Europe

The nineteenth-century spread of mass literacy was first of all a process of
European
cultural history. On that continent—only in China do we find anything comparable, with no influences on each other—roots existed here and there in an older tradition of book reading that went back to the age of the Reformation or the “popular enlightenment” and its emphasis on practical pedagogy. The nineteenth century continued these trends and gave them a certain finality. It was the rise of mass education that, in conjunction with the “scientific revolution” of the early modern period, laid the key foundations of our age. Beyond the functional aspect of increased competence, literacy gained new symbolic significance as the expression of progress, civilization, and national cohesion by creating an imagined community of people capable of communicating with one another but also of being steered toward common goals.
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By 1920 the male population of the major European countries, as well as part of the female population, was in possession of reading and writings skills.

Lest we create the impression of an educated continent facing a world sunk in ignorance, some distinctions need to be drawn within Europe itself. Only Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany were 100 percent literate in 1910; the rate in France was 87 percent, while in Belgium, the least literate of the “developed” European countries, it was 85 percent. Then, a long way behind, came southern Europe: 62 percent were literate in Italy, 50 percent in Spain, only 25 percent in Portugal;
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the picture was certainly no better on the eastern and southeastern periphery of Europe. Nevertheless, there were certain continent-wide tendencies:
the proportion of literate males and females was rising constantly and in no case stagnating. Some countries—Sweden, for example—was advancing rapidly from a high initial level.

The period around 1860 was a watershed for the whole of Europe. Before, only Prussia had come close to the goal of completely eradicating illiteracy, but a quickening of the pace after 1860 is apparent not only from the statistical data but also from the general climate in society. By the turn of the century, widespread illiteracy was no longer taken for granted even in Russia or the Balkans; an ability to read and write was seen more or less everywhere as a normal state of affairs and a political objective worth striving for. It was achieved not only in the nobility and urban middle classes but also among artisan strata in town and country, skilled workers, and ever larger numbers of the peasantry.
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Regional differences did not completely disappear. In the 1900 census, the Vorarlberg region of Austria recorded just 1 percent illiteracy, while the figure in Habsburg Dalmatia was 73 percent.
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It would be a while longer before reading and writing skills permeated the last village in Russia or Serbia, Sicily or the Peloponnese.

Full literacy did not come overnight: it was a long process that did not embrace whole countries all at once. It began in small groups. Some family members, mostly the younger generation, learned to read, others did not. This had consequences for parental authority. Villages, neighborhoods, or parishes gradually changed their mix of cultural techniques. It would be too simple to assume that there was a wholesale transition from orality to literacy; competence in writing continued to impart cultural authority, and oral communication persisted in many of its old forms. The fact that from about 1780, urban intellectuals in Europe were transcribing fairy tales, legends, and folk songs, giving them a tone of highly artificial naturalness, was a sign that oral traditions were losing their spontaneous impact. Examples in Germany included Johann Gottfried Herder (who published several sets of folktales from 1778 on), Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
, 1805–8), and the Brothers Grimm, whose first collection,
Children's and Household Tales
(1812), would become the hardiest perennial of German literature.
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Only that which is, or is becoming, “alien” can be rediscovered. Mass literacy first developed in the cities and often percolated very slowly into village society, so that during a transitional period it actually widened the cultural gap between town and country. It also changed the parameters of
Bildung
. Only those who read much and without difficulty could participate in the semantic universe of high culture. But the spread of reading also increased the demand for popular material—from the farmer's almanac to pulp fiction. Historians have closely studied these fine shades of democratization between the two poles of “high culture” and “popular culture.”
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Elites reacted to mass literacy in contradictory ways. On the one hand, the enlightenment of “simple people,” dispelling superstition with rational literature and generally standardizing cultural practices, appeared as a prime instance of “civilizing from above” that spread modernity and promoted national
integration. On the other hand, mistrust lingered on (though everywhere in a downward curve), since the cultural emancipation of the masses—as the workers' associations soon showed—was bound up with demands for social and political betterment. This attitude on the part of the powerful and well educated was not without a basis in reality. More democratic access to literary forms of communication did usually lead to restructuring of the hierarchies of prestige and power, opening up new possibilities for an attack on the existing order. The cultural worries of the elite also reverberated in gender politics. The idea that immoderate reading could lead to fanciful illusions and (especially among women) to an overheated erotic imagination—a satirical theme in literature up to Gustave Flaubert's
Madame Bovary
(1856) and beyond—was a source of concern for male guardians of morality.
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Mass literacy campaigns were mostly initiated by the government of the day. Elementary schools were their chief instrument, although for a time many European governments were content to leave them in the hands of the church. The weaker a state was, the stronger the educational role of religious institutions, if only in the modest form of Sunday schools, remained. Or to put it in another way: the state, churches, and private providers competed with one another to serve a burgeoning education market. Nor was this in essence a purely European phenomenon. The English education system, for example, had many similarities to that which existed around the same time in Muslim countries: for example, the primary level was largely controlled by religious institutions, whose main aims were to teach reading and writing, to inculcate moral values, and to protect children from “bad influences” in their everyday environment. The differences were a matter of degree more than principle. In England there was less learning by rote, less recitation of sacred texts, a slightly greater practical orientation, and a moderately better provision of material aids and furnishings for schools.
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Popular education could not be simply forced down people's throats. It could be successful only if they associated their own desires and interests with it. The difficulties that every country faced in actually enforcing compulsory education (at various moments in the nineteenth or twentieth century) point to the extraordinary importance of parental cooperation. Economic requirements had to be fulfilled if mass literacy was to be achieved. Of course, it would be wrong to underestimate the genuine thirst for education in many societies: the motivation to learn reading and writing, both for oneself and for one's children, was not only a question of material gain and utility. Nevertheless, only above a certain income threshold were families able to release their children from production and to cover the costs of regular schooling. Mass education with fixed hours of attendance and set tasks that had to be done regardless of the rhythm of the local economy was possible only where children did not have to work to keep the home in one piece. On average, it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that European families became prepared to send their seven-to twelve-year-old children to the special world of the school, where professional teachers
(whose professionalism was often debatable) had an authority that could hardly be challenged from outside.
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The actual figures should not be exaggerated, however. In Britain in 1895, only 82 percent of children registered to attend primary school were regularly present in the classrooms.
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In many other countries of Europe, the proportion was far smaller.

An Age of Reading in the United States

Were there similar developments outside Europe? The school uptake in countries such as Mexico, Argentina, or the Philippines was not dramatically lower than in southern Europe or the Balkans.
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As far as literacy is concerned, comparative research is still in its infancy, and in many parts of the world, statistics are lacking for the whole of the nineteenth century. Of course, this is not the case for North America, where the early colonies already had high levels of literacy comparable with those in the most advanced European countries. Increased immigration in the nineteenth century meant that an ability to read and write in English was often equated with “Americanization.” Many new arrivals, especially Catholics, accepted this imperative, but created educational institutions of their own where learning was closely associated with religion and ethnic identity. From the 1840s on, there was a growing sense in the United States that an “age of reading” had dawned. Rapid expansion of the press and book production contributed to this, as the Northeast in particular became the locus of a vigorous print culture.

By 1860 the male literacy rate in New England was already 95 percent, and uniquely in the world, women there had reached a similar level. The fact that the national average (an especially unhelpful term in the United States) was considerably lower had to do less with a certain backwardness of the white population in the West and South than with the low literacy rate among blacks and Native Americans. Some slaves learned to read the Bible from their mistress, but normally they were kept well away from such things: a literate slave could become a fomenter of rebellion and was treated with constant suspicion. As for the Northern states, despite much discrimination, freed slaves showed a great interest in written forms of communication—as several hundred autobiographies from the two decades before the Civil War eloquently testify. The nationwide literacy rate among African Americans rose from 39 percent in 1890 to 89 percent in 1910, but then fell back to 82 percent in 1930;
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it was thus higher than in any population group of comparable size in black Africa or much of rural eastern and southern Europe. After the restoration of white hegemony in the Southern states in the 1870s, however, African Americans had to fight for an education through common efforts against a hostile white environment and an (at best) indifferent government.
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The same was true for other disadvantaged ethnic segments of US society. Some Indian peoples, though facing great resistance, used literacy as an instrument of cultural affirmation; the most notable case was the Cherokee Nation, which had had a written language since 1809 and was able to use this as the
basis for a simultaneous acquisition of reading and writing skills in both Cherokee and English. Similarly, in many other parts of the world, languages first had to be given an alphabet and lexically recorded (often, though not always, by missionaries); then parts of the Bible were translated and used as exercise material, providing the basis for the enrichment of communication through writing.

Asia's Old Literate Cultures

The picture was different again in civilizations that had treasured writing and learning since time immemorial: the Islamic countries, with their strong focus on the Koran and legal-theological commentaries, and the regions influenced by Chinese culture. In Egypt less than 1 percent of the population was able to read in 1800; this rose to 3–4 percent by 1880 as a result of modernization policies, and the 1897 census, the first in modern Egypt, recorded 400,000 literate people, or roughly 6 percent of the population over the age of seven (excluding nomads and foreigners).
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In 1800, even by strict European standards, Japan was already a society permeated with writing. A literary mass market had emerged as early as the seventeenth century in the cities; all samurai and the numerous village headmen had to be literate and to read Chinese characters in order to carry out their administrative tasks. On the whole, the authorities did not fear educated subjects, and some princely houses saw it as their duty to raise the moral and technical level of the population at large. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, elementary education already went beyond the circle of rural notables, and by the end of the Tokugawa period in 1867 as many as 45 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls (some estimates are even higher) had regular instruction outside the home in reading and writing.
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All this happened without the slightest European influence, missionaries having been banned from the country since the 1630s. In 1871 a national education ministry was created, and the Meiji government made it a high priority to develop every level, from the village school to the university, under close central supervision. Many schools and teachers from the Tokugawa period were incorporated into the new system, which provided for a compulsory four-year course. Pedagogues now began to study Western models and brought over some elements from it, but isolated premodern Japan had already set its sights on state-run education, and an independent direction was much more in evidence than in the army reforms introduced during the same period. By 1909, near the end of the Meiji period, the number of illiterates among twenty-year-old recruits was below 10 percent almost throughout the archipelago—a success without parallel elsewhere in Asia.
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