Sapper Redux said:
This is too reductive. The Enlightenment, for example, reached its intellectual and philosophical apex in Catholic France. What drove literacy more than anything was economics. The very existence of mass printing coupled with the economic rise of cities created a middle class that needed literacy in a way your average Medieval worker didn't. Protestantism influenced certain pushes for literacy, amongst the Puritans, for example, which is why New England was vastly better educated than the rest of the country for centuries. However, the people attracted to Puritanism in England were educated middling class people. You can easily find Protestant nations with poor literacy. It depended on the economic context more than the religious context.
The shift away from literacy today may reflect a retreat in economic opportunities and a narrowing of horizons for folks in poorer communities. Again, this isn't new. You'd find large pockets of illiteracy in poor rural and urban communities without access to middle class careers.
I disagree
First, the economic drive to produce literacy did not occur until centuries after the rapid rise in literacy across Europe. It is well documented that literacy rose sharply in the 1600s, but the industrial revolution was not widespread until the 1800s. Prior to that the overwhelming majority of people were agricultural workers doing the same jobs their families had done for centuries. They had no economic need to read. Yet they all started becoming literate at very rapid rates. This coincided with the Protestant Reformation/Catholic Counterreformation. Even the 1800s it is shown that Protestants had 20% higher literature rates than Catholics under similar circumstances, including the widespread use of the printing press and similar economic conditions. And that's after the advances of the Counter Reformation.
In addition to literacy being completely superfluous for ag workers, it was the same during the early industrialized era. Factory workers did not need to read for any practical purposes. There have always been professions, like clerk and lawyer, that required literacy. But these were hardly widespread enough to account for historical changes.
I stand by my original statement. People learn to read primarily for ideological reasons. Look at the Jewish people. They have very high rates of literacy throught history, and it has certainly benefitted them economically. However, they are not teaching their children to read using business journals. They teach them to read using the Tanakh. Ideology drives reading, and then the benefits follow. The Protestants had Sola Scriptura to drive literacy, and the Catholics followed suit. But the Catholics have less ideological drive to read, and therefore a gap between them persisted for centuries. The Enlightenment thinkers believed in immutable universal truths. Writing was the best way to share and preserve those truths, and therefore literacy was essential.
You can talk about Protestant communities with limited economic opportunity having "low literacy", but you need to define that a bit. If they are all ag and construction workers, the need for reading economically might be close to 0%. So when 50% of the population reads with no economic incentive at all, then how would you explain that other than ideology?
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