2004/05/01 by Deborah Brandt · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Taxation and Legal Issues #American Constitutional Law and Politics
paper · doi:10.2307/4140731
openalex publication_date 2004/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
istorians often mention World War II as a time when expectations for schooling and literacy really took off-when what was considered an adequate level of education moved from fourth grade to twelfth grade in a matter of a few years. The conduct of modern war certainly would explain the rise. Fighting became less about muscle power and more about advantages of superior knowledge and speedy communication. Everything from computers to sonar, radar, insecticides, and nuclear power came into existence during these years (Clark and Sloan). Soldiers were needed to mediate technologies, gather intelligence, operate communication systems, and run bureaucracies that were growing faster and more elaborate literally by the month. But to say only that these technological changes forced a higher standard for literacy is to miss more dramatic turns of events. First, as we shall see, the route to a higher official standard for literacy was (and remains) far from a straight line. Reading and writing standards have risen and fallen with the nation's shifting military fortunes. Even more profoundly, though, World War II changed the rationale for mass literacy. Literacy was irrevocably transformed from a nineteenth-century moral imperative into a twentieth-century production imperative-transformed from an attribute of a good individual into an individual good, a resource or raw material vital to national security and global competition. In the process, literacy was turned into something extractable, something measurable, something rentable, and thereby something worthy of rational investment. If, as is widely acknowledged, World War II produced the technologies and products that would fuel the American economy for the next fifty years, it also gave the nation an ap