Happy Pi Day

There is no compulsory education in Singapore, but their
school attendance is 98% and their aggregate literacy shames
America’s. Prior to compulsory education in America, 100
million sets of Noah Webster’s Speller were sold in the years
after 1783 (this was also a time when scholarships for the
poor were pervasive), and the six-volume Eclectic Readers by
W.H. McGuffey sold 120 million sets during the decades after
1836. These are astonishing numbers given the US population
during that era. Non-compulsory education once gave our
nation its highest literacy rates, as documented not only by
Alexis de Tocqueville, but also by the study Thomas Jefferson
commissioned DuPont to conduct in 1800, which showed
national literacy standing at 99.7% (compared to today’s 80%
figure for high school graduates, which doesn’t even include
the one million dropouts produced every year).

~ Martin G. Selbrede