[Braggadocious]

That's sortof what the enlightenment was about... The enlightenment period was a decentralization of information caused by the reinvention and widespread use of the printing press in europe. During the dark ages europe's literacy rate was comparable to pre-mesopotamia. The fall of the roman empire lead to a fracturing of european civilization, the near-total loss of literacy, latin fractured into a dozen languages because priests wrote and read at a first grade level, misspelling words, reading with one finger slowly scrolling the text, mouthing each word phonetically...Ancient Greek texts were completely lost for a time...

Because nobody could read and copies the bible were sparse the catholic church was the single source of word of god. The printing press changed things. The bible became widespread and people read the bible for themselves. With that came an important shift, that one's own interpretation of a text was a valid interpretation. Tons of important literary works became widespread. The middle class valued literacy and saw it as a ticket to wealth and began teaching their kids to read and write competitively at younger and younger ages. They invented the education system we have today; the entire idea of a sequential learning system based around books, and becoming an adult when you could read at a certain level (as opposed to the catholic belief that you were an adult when you were old enough to fight at age ten), that was also the enlightenment and romantic period. Protestantism came about because people valued individual interpretations of the bible, which the catholic church had serious qualms with since that was their entire claim to authority...

So the fact that you grew up in a family which valued literacy, which sent you to a university where you spent four years reading books, and then came out of that with your own valid and rational ideas about what those texts mean, and your rite of passage into adulthood is based on your ability to read and write at a university level, that is still very much framed in the values of the enlightenment.

[yters]

The precise narrative you just articulated is that of the enlightenment in the 18th century, which is a period much latter than the invention of the printing press and Protestantism.

A good book for you to check out is Rodney Stark's "For the Glory of God", written by a secular historian debunking much of the above narrative.

The fact that many educated today take your narrative for unarguable fact also illustrates the problem. The 'enlightenment' narrative is ironically very self limiting.

[Braggadocious]

The brutality of the dark ages has been debunked. The timeline I just gave you about illiteracy, the printing press, the enlightenment, and our 400 year old education system remains in tact. Neil postman's a good source for the history of education (see "The Disappearance of Childhood") or you can simply wikipedia it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) There's some graphs that show how the enlightenment coincides an exponential growth in mass publication.

As far as protestantism and the printing press being invented prior to the enlightenment, yeah. Without widespread use of both you don't get the enlightenment for reasons I mentioned previously. And neither were really new ideas, either. Ancient greece had the printing press, high rates of literacy and a belief in interpreting texts for yourself, but these ideas were lost during the dark ages.