The data you've cited is wrong though. It lists Sweden's literacy rate in 1800 at 21%.
People were interviewed by their local priests to see whether they could read and the results were noted down. From this we know that in the middle of the 1700eds the 70-90% of all people could read.
The law was also clear. You couldn't get married unless you could read. To be married you had to be confirmed, and to be confirmed you had to be able to read.
>Only a tiny minority of the working population could read Ancient Greek in Europe in 1800. In England, around 50% of the population were still entirely illiterate at that point in time.
Surely that can't be true? Here in Sweden literacy was made mandatory for adults in 1686. It was not permitted to get married without being able to read.
Surely England can't have been that far behind, as late as 1800ed?
Did you know that Sweden (which included Finland) had effectively 100% reading ability as early as the first part of 18th century?
This was due to a decree (Church law of 1686) by Charles XI which required reading skill in order to be allowed to wed.
There are complete parochial records ("church examination registers") to study this progress up to level of single individuals.
Surprisingly enough these documents prove that writing ability and reading ability don't need to go hand in hand which has often been thought as self-evident.
tl;dr What you don't see immediately in Finnish/Swedish education is hundreds of years of reading tradition and deep historical commitment to literacy (ability to read), quite unconnected to industrialization (unlike elsewhere), which happened rather late in Sweden and Finland.
"The reading ability campaign in Sweden was carried through almost completely without the aid of proper schools." (pg. 42) Thus there has always been a strong component of household education.
> Two hundred years ago if you knew how to read and write, it probably meant that you were in an eclectic group of people whose profession was reading and writing
While there weren't the quality of literacy statistics that there are now, most of what I can find indicates that in at least Northern/Western Europe and North America, literacy, while not as near universal as today, was something that the majority of the population possessed 200 years ago, not limited just to people whose professional occupation was reading and writing (certainly, things like a "Farmer's Almanac" make little sense if people whose profession is "farmer" aren't, at least reasonably frequently, literate.)
I would be intrigued to know the percentage of pirate gunners of 1800 that could read at all. Best guess is less than 30% and most of those, barely literate. England was, however, one of the best educated countries of the day.
Charitably, reading was not "widespread in the population" at that time. sandworm101's comment shows a pretty appalling understanding of evolution -- the selective pressure for reading ability exists as soon as anyone can benefit from learning to read, not when everyone is required to try -- but a somewhat better understanding of history.
Very high literacy rates within endogamous subpopulations go back much farther than a couple hundred years, though.
>The literacy rate for all males and females that are at least 15 years old is 86.3%. Males aged 15 and over have a literacy rate of 90%, while females lag only slightly behind at 82.7%. However, massive country-to-country differences exist. Developed nations almost always have an adult literacy rate of 96% or better.
Consider that as of 1800 or so, perhaps 5-10% of the population were literate. That climbed to 90%+ throughout much of Western Europe and the US by 1900, but the level of education was still low: in the US, a high school diploma was an accomplishment only 6% of the population realised in 1900. That climbed to about 90% by 1950 or so. By contrast, more people have graduate degrees today.
Though the content and quality expressed by education ... has shifted. On the one hand, there's clearly been advances in knowledge and education, but at the same time, those are being presented to a much, much larger share of the population.
I've seen people (children, students, professionals) with widely varying levels of literacy and cognitive skills, ranging from frighteningly high to almost none at all. I think this may be underappreciated.
Or, TL;DR: yes, a lot of people are terrible at reading.
Still though, if you look at today, there's plenty of people who can read, but don't. You'll find lots of modern people who don't know anything about what happened in history, what the political themes are, and so on.
People were interviewed by their local priests to see whether they could read and the results were noted down. From this we know that in the middle of the 1700eds the 70-90% of all people could read.
The law was also clear. You couldn't get married unless you could read. To be married you had to be confirmed, and to be confirmed you had to be able to read.
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