Maybe It Was Better

I remember a show called "Civil War Diaries" where famous actors read letters and journal entries from selected Civil War soldiers.  They were presented with just enough history lecture to give the letters context.

The troops writing these letters were predominately educated in one-room school houses that were funded locally.

These letters show excellent sentence structure, spelling and grammar.  The "selected" portion of the show was picking letters with poetic content or where the troop had something to say that underscored the history lecture.

I've seen web pages where tests from this era are put online to see if we modern folk can pass them.  After you get done taking it and saying, "shit, that was hard!" you see that it's a fourth grade test on the topic.  "But I went to college before I learned most of this," you meekly whimper...

Now we pour vast amounts of Federal money into education, orders of magnitude more (and that's accounting for inflation!) than the one-room model had available, and we're getting almost literally nothing out of it.

Need to see confirmation?

Go no further than any internet forum.  But you needn't go that far, most of us have "that friend" who still sends text messages from a smart phone that look like, "luv u 2 b bak l8r"...  I remember when that short-hand was developed, it was when the length of a text message was truncated so far as to make the limit on Twitter seem like War and Peace.  Plus text messages weren't free then, you paid a nickel each!