Before schools for everyone
For most of history, learning to read happened in scattered ways. Some children learned from a parent, a local priest, a village teacher or a tutor. Others attended schools run by religious bodies, guilds or charities, often for a fee. Many learned little or nothing. Reading and writing were also taught separately in many places, so a person could read a little without being able to write.
Religious motives played a large part. Some Protestant movements in early modern Europe encouraged people to read scripture for themselves, which pushed communities to teach reading. In parts of northern Europe, church and local authorities encouraged or expected reading ability, and literacy in some of those regions rose early. But these efforts rarely reached everyone, and the quality varied.
The idea of a school system
The notion that a state should organize and supervise schooling for all children took hold gradually, mainly from the eighteenth century. Rulers in several European states wanted a more skilled population and more loyal subjects. Reformers saw education as a path to moral improvement and social order. Prussia is often cited as an early example of a state school system with attendance expected of children, and other states studied or borrowed from it.
Over the nineteenth century, systems of public education spread across Europe and North America. A few features recur across many countries:
- laws requiring children to attend school up to a certain age
- public funding, and later the removal of fees
- training and certification for teachers
- standard curricula, textbooks and school buildings
- inspection to check what was being taught
The details differed. Some places made attendance compulsory long before they provided enough schools to attend. In England, a major act in 1870 set out to ensure schools were available across the country, and attendance was made compulsory for young children in the following decade. In the United States, schooling was managed mainly by individual states, and Massachusetts is commonly credited with passing the first compulsory attendance law in the early 1850s; it took until the early twentieth century for all states to follow.
What schools taught
The core of the early curriculum was often described as reading, writing and arithmetic. Reading lessons commonly relied on drill, recitation and graded readers: short books that increased in difficulty. Teachers had large classes, and methods were frequently rigid. Over time, ideas about teaching changed, and debates about the best way to teach reading, including whether to start from letters and sounds or from whole words and meaning, have continued into the present. That is a subject for the science of how children learn to read, and the history here only shows that the arguments are old.
Schools also used reading to teach more than reading. Textbooks carried messages about religion, citizenship, language and national history. In some countries, schooling promoted a standard national language, which could displace local languages and dialects. The effect on communities who spoke minority languages was often painful, and it is one reason questions of multilingual literacy remain important.
Literacy rises, unevenly
As schooling spread, literacy rates climbed in many countries. Measuring this is not simple. Older estimates often relied on whether people could sign their names on marriage records or legal documents, which is a rough guide at best. Modern surveys use different definitions, and a person who can read a short sentence is not necessarily able to handle a complex text.
With those cautions, the broad trend is clear. In many industrializing countries, the share of adults who could read grew substantially through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and became very high in the wealthiest countries. In other regions, change came later, often following independence, new national education programs or global campaigns for universal primary education. Even today, many millions of adults worldwide have limited reading skills, and the gaps in global literacy rates reflect differences in resources, conflict, language and policy.
Progress was also unequal within countries. Girls were often schooled less than boys, rural children attended less than urban ones, and poor families sometimes kept children out of school for work. Enslaved people, Indigenous children and members of various minority groups were frequently excluded or taught under unequal conditions. The history of access is not a simple story of steady improvement.
Why schooling mattered more than technology
It is tempting to credit printing, cheaper paper or newspapers for the rise of mass literacy. Those developments created the supply of reading material, but supply alone did not teach people to read. Widespread literacy depended on children spending years in a classroom with a trained adult. In this sense, schooling is the main reason that reading became an ordinary adult skill instead of a specialist one.
Schools also changed what reading meant for many families. Reading became a normal expectation of childhood, and homework, school libraries and reading assessments followed. People who left school without learning to read well often came to feel it as a personal failing, though the real cause was frequently poor access or instruction. Many adult learners return to the task later in life, and adult learning programs have a long history of their own.
A cautious summary
Public education did not cause literacy single-handedly, and it did not work equally well for everyone. But it is difficult to find a major rise in literacy that did not involve organized teaching at scale. Seen over two centuries, mass schooling changed reading from a privilege held by a minority into a shared expectation, while leaving unfinished work for those still without access.