Illiteracy and Brexit
The reason behind Britain’s downfall is rooted in its repeated failure to properly educate its citizens…
In no other country in the universe is a man’s class inextricably linked to his life choices and outcomes.
Unlike in America where you have had the likes of Abraham Lincoln, William Jefferson Clinton, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon and several others who came from humble backgrounds and yet rose to the highest office in the land, Britain has forever been in the grip of the upper class or in local parlance — the toffs.
Even before industrialization changed the fortunes of the United Kingdom, the percentage of those who could read and write were in the single digits.
And when we factor in the historical truth that child labour was rife in mines and pits all over Scotland, Wales and England, only then do we start to appreciate the degree to which very little effort was made by the political leaders in the 19th century to educate the working class.
The education acts of 1870 and 1880 didn’t exactly drive millions of poor children from all over the country to full literacy; it simply meant that they went as far as having a primary school education, which was all about learning the rudimentary stuff.
To be born working class in the 18th and 19th centuries was to be condemned to a…