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Thread: Literacy

  1. #11
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    Oct 2004
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    I guess that where AnjaliUK is coming from is that because they were all criminals literacy would be lower than in the population at large so one should not make hasty judgements.

    I am not a sociologist but I have read that these days reading and writing ability in the criminal classes is generally lower than in the population at large. The connection one could make based on this is that the failure of the education system today to provide schoolchildren with basic literacy and numeracy is directly responsible for so many of them resorting to criminal behaviour. That is obviously far too simplistic an analysis but it may certainly be a major contributory factor. So many teachers do not seem to be taught to teach properly.

    However, whether or not true today, it is difficult to extrapolate backwards to the 19th century with certainty. We have all come across (and it is well documented on this forum) the type of relatively trivial misdemeanour that could get you sentenced to prison with hard labour at that time. Often the crime was the result of the extreme poverty (e.g. stealing food) that was so prevalent in those days. The way we judge poverty today, when a poor family gets the kind of benefits to put sufficient food on the table and buy a flat screen TV, would astonish the Victorians.

    So I think it unwise both to judge general literacy levels from those of a convict ship but they could nevertheless be closer to general levels than they would be today for the reasons above. That is to say, low literacy might have been more common in those days but poverty was a far greater factor and the threshold to becoming a criminal was pretty low too. Quite a different set of levers!
    "People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.” Edmund Burke

  2. #12
    DorothySandra
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    Until schools were provided by the state, literacy was very much a local matter. In some areas a local family would provide a teacher - the school were Jane Eyre taught after she ran away from Thornfield is a well-described example. In other areas the people who could have done so thought it was a bad thing to educate the working classes - Cranford has an example of that, and an example of this being a losing battle by the time the railways were being built.

    Before the 19th Century, literate people taught their children, if and when they had time and inclination. I don't think it's possible to generalise about the country as a whole.

    By the 19th century the grade of literacy seems to have been used as an indication of intelligence and upbringing, and potential as useful workers.

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