I think the most important thing that has been lost, apart from geographical and historical facts that I usually bitch about, is that people with no schooling or none in the 19th century were clearly able due to lots of practice to read, articulate, and write complex sentences, including very sophisticated syntactical relationships, such as hypotaxis (i.e. subordinate clauses, relative clauses) which are far beyond most university students today until they get into 3rd year. Ordinary people read the Bible, Dickens and Scott and Shakespeare; children could not get out of the 8th grade without having worked through novels like The Mill on the Floss. This is not Romantic nostalgia. I have done research into this in Canada for presentation at hearings into education policy, and that was the level of complex reasoning that was available to ordinary people. You only have to read court transcripts of vagrancy hearings or servants complaints. That meant that they could weigh evidence, present positions, and engage in arguments that would baffle most of my students who read and write like infants. Many of them are very smart, but are handcuffed by their lack of mental structure. They are vaguely gesturing in the direction of thinking.

Sorry, I have been marking student papers all week, so I am somewhat exercised about this!!!!!!!!!

yours, Peter T.