[bnegreve]

Surely reading/writing are useful skills that most people did not have before school was mandatory.

[bluGill]

> Surely reading/writing are useful skills that most people did not have before school was mandatory.

Citation needed. I've heard it repeated a lot, but never by someone with actual historical credentials. It varied from society to society (and many societies were sexist so boys and girls would have different results). Likely most is correct, but also misleading as it appears many societies were very literate even among poor people.

From what I understand (recognize I'm not a historian!), Jewish boys have long had a right of passage of reading the bible in the local synagogue. Most languages are not that hard to learn the basic phonics of and thus read and write. You wouldn't be good, but you could do it.

Historians have told me that most of their references for is literate were from time/places where literate meant Latin. The common person know much Latin (despite going to mass in Latin), and couldn't read/write it. However they would have had more education in their local language which was never counted.

[constantcrying]

I did not take me twelve years to learn to read and write. What an awful excuse. What made me good at reading was reading books outside of school.

In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.

[moooo99]

> In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.

I learned more in a single year on the job than I did in 3 years of university. That doesn’t make university useless

[rad_gruchalski]

No, I don’t think that’s true. The 12 years of the pre-uni education set you up for being a member of society. You don’t see it because it became a part of you. You also learned to read, write, all basic math, geography, …

The uni taught you more real-world expected skills but I‘m certain you learned more before uni.

[kube-system]

> I did not take me twelve years to learn to read and write.

It takes people twelve years to learn to read and write at a 12th grade level.

You could study it for another 4 or more years at university if you wanted to develop your skills further.

> What made me good at reading was reading books outside of school.

This is your personal experience. I learned to read and write quite well at school and was well-prepared for university.

[andrepd]

> In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.

You keep saying this but I have a hard time believing this is true; in fact I'm not even sure what "more" means (objectively) in this context.

Let's see, in the 12 years of schooling you've learned at the very least: how to read and write, how to interpret texts, how to read literature, how to compose an essay, how to speak, read, and write a second language, a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths, several topics of physics and chemistry, biology, geology, and other natural sciences (in more or less detail), several years of history, and mandatory physical exercise to top it off. What magical university did you go to that in a single semester you learned more than that :D Unless I'm missing something.

[tremon]

You should have taken that semester when you were 4 years old then, you could have skipped fifteen years of education!

[Ekaros]

They did. Well at least officially. Being able to read was needed if you wanted to get married.