Literacy thrives in free-market education

Put education into the hands of parents and the free market, and results improve. Public schools and universal compulsory attendance laws are relatively new, yet American literacy rates were exceedingly high before either of these were instituted.

John Adams, second president of the United States, declared in 1765, “A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare…as a comet or an earthquake.” Several decades later, in the early days of the Republic, a Frenchman, Du Pont de Nemours, published his observations of American education: “Most young Americans…can read, write and cipher. Not more than four in a thousand are unable to write legibly.” These stellar results were obtained in an age when public schools were practically unknown. Book sellers stocked primers and spellers by the dozens, and most children learned to read at home. Private schools were established by entrepreneurs, churches, and charities; private education was accessible to rich and poor alike.

Between 1650 and 1795, literacy among American men rose from 60 to 90 percent. Women’s literacy in those years followed a similar, though lagging, trend. The gender gap in literacy closed during the 19th century. From 1800 to 1840, literacy rates increased from 75 to up to 97 percent in the North and from 55 to 81 percent in the South. Even slaves, with the embargo on teaching them to read, managed to gain an antebellum literacy rate of 10 to 20 percent, and after the Civil War, literacy among the black population soared to over 70 percent by 1910.

Contrasted with historical literacy rates, modern education comes up short. Today, 30 plus million American adults are illiterate. Almost 20 percent are functionally illiterate, which means they do not possess the skills to function in daily life or many jobs. Two-thirds of students in public schools are not proficient in any subject. It’s time to remove state regulation of private schools and allow the free-market to make American education great again!

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Christy Oliver is the founder and director of Step Out Summit and Areté Press. She earned M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Animal and Range Science from North Dakota State University in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Subsequently, she was awarded a Congressional Science Fellowship. Christy was home-educated K-12 by parents who were pioneers in the homeschool movement of the early 1980s, and she started a microschool in Virginia where she taught for 11 years.

She is a guest author for American Experiment North Dakota.