Literacy rates were high at the time of the American Revolution for the same reason that most young people are so dextrous at text messaging today: At the time, ordinary people actually conducted their most important communications in writing, so, to be illiterate was to be cut off from society. To picture what it meant to be illiterate at that time, you might imagine a modern high school student not learning to use a cell phone.

The past century has brought the rise of all sorts of alternatives to text, and so literacy fell as the number of people growing up perceiving text as essential fell. Literacy became something many people enjoyed and most others thought they SHOULD learn -- yet, many did not feel the need for it on a visceral level.

Schools did not cause this situation, but schools can, I suppose, be blamed for not acknowledging the impossibility of an institution altering history in this sense.

Ironically, it may turn out that computerization and text messaging raises literacy once again, although I can bet that those who most bemoaned falling literacy will still be displeased because these developments will also hasten changes in written language, which they will insist are "wrong" and "ungrammatical."