![]() You can read more about the expansion of education systems around the world in our entry on Financing Education. And the rate of growth really climbed after the middle of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority. ![]() ![]() As we can see, literacy rates grew constantly but rather slowly until the beginning of the twentieth century. The following visualization presents estimates of world literacy for the period 1800-2016. It was only in the 19th and 20th centuries that rates of literacy approached universality in early-industrialized countries. 2 In fact, while the ambition of universal literacy in Europe was a fundamental reform born from the Enlightenment, it took centuries for it to happen. It was only until the Middle Ages that book production started growing and literacy among the general population slowly started becoming important in the Western World. While the earliest forms of written communication date back to about 3,500-3,000 BCE, literacy remained for centuries a very restricted technology closely associated with the exercise of power. ![]()
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