Who gets to read in America? 250 years of literacy
Has America always wanted its children to read?
It feels like the obvious answer should be yes. But the real story is much more complicated.
At our latest Read by 4th Lunch & Learn, Dr. Alicia Meyer, curator at the University of Pennsylvania Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, took us through more than 300 years of literacy history in America. Her opening line: you cannot understand America's promise of liberty without understanding who was, and wasn't, allowed to read.
The story of America's love of reading is only half true.
Early America often celebrated literacy as a pathway to faith, opportunity, and independence. But who had access to that opportunity was another question entirely.
In 1642, Massachusetts passed the Old Deluder Satan Law, often remembered as America’s first reading law. The law is usually described as an effort to make sure children could read the Bible. But Dr. Meyer pushed us to look closer. When you look at the actual text, another motivation appears: enforcement and control. The law allowed communities to monitor families and even remove children from parents who failed to teach them.
Philadelphia imagined literacy differently.
Forty years later, William Penn’s Philadelphia created its own literacy law with a different vision. Instead of focusing on enforcement, the city connected reading and writing to opportunity. Literacy meant learning a trade. A trade meant a chance to support a family and weather difficult times.
The right to read has never been equal.
For much of American history, access to literacy depended on race, class, gender, and geography. Historians once estimated only 20% of white men and 5% of white women could read and write in the 1700s. Enslaved and Indigenous people were caught in a brutal contradiction: taught just enough English literacy to be controlled, but denied it the moment literacy became a tool for resistance.
This is a thread worth its own deep dive. For more on the history of literacy and Black liberation, check out our earlier Lunch & Learn, Literacy as Liberation featuring Ismael Jimenez.
Why this matters now
Literacy has always been tangled up with who holds power and who doesn't.
Every child denied literacy by class, race, or gender in 1700 is part of the same story as a child today held back by an under-resourced school. Different century, same fight.
As the country marks its 250th year, we are asked to sit with a powerful contradiction. The promise that “all people are created equal” was written in a nation that did not extend the right to read to all its people. And 250 years later, we are still working to make that promise real.
We look to history not only to avoid repeating it, but to understand what we are still fighting for and why every child’s right to read matters.
Watch the full Lunch & Learn below for Dr. Meyer's complete talk. Want to go deeper? She recommends the following books:
