For most of human history, reading was a technology reserved for priests, scribes, and aristocrats. The idea that ordinary people—farmers, laborers, shopkeepers—should learn to decode written symbols struck many authorities as not just impractical but genuinely dangerous.

Today we take universal literacy so completely for granted that we forget it was once a revolutionary demand. Understanding why teaching everyone to read seemed threatening reveals something essential about how knowledge relates to power—and why the Enlightenment's push for education transformed civilization more profoundly than any military conquest.

When Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in 1534, Catholic authorities didn't just object on theological grounds. They understood something profound: a person who could read scripture directly no longer needed a priest to interpret it. Literacy creates interpreters, and interpreters form their own conclusions.

This fear extended far beyond religion. Colonial powers across the Atlantic made teaching enslaved people to read a criminal offense. Aristocratic writers warned that educated peasants would abandon their fields. Factory owners worried that literate workers would read radical pamphlets. The consistent thread wasn't that reading itself was harmful—it was that reading enabled people to think for themselves.

What authorities grasped intuitively, Enlightenment philosophers articulated explicitly. Immanuel Kant defined Enlightenment as humanity's emergence from "self-imposed immaturity"—the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. Reading was the technology that made this emergence possible. It gave individuals direct access to ideas, arguments, and information that had previously been filtered through authorized interpreters.

Takeaway

Literacy doesn't just transmit information—it creates independent minds capable of evaluating claims for themselves, which is precisely why it threatened every system built on unquestioned authority.

The Enlightenment didn't just advocate literacy—it connected reading to citizenship. John Locke argued that legitimate government required the consent of the governed. But meaningful consent requires understanding. How can you consent to laws you cannot read? How can you evaluate rulers whose policies you cannot comprehend?

This connection between literacy and democracy drove the push for public education. Thomas Jefferson insisted that democracy without educated citizens would inevitably collapse into tyranny. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," he wrote, "it expects what never was and never will be." The printing press had created the possibility of informed citizenship. Universal literacy would create the reality.

The transformation was profound. A literate population could read newspapers, compare accounts, detect contradictions, and form opinions based on evidence rather than rumor or authority. They could read founding documents, philosophical treatises, and political arguments. They became participants in public debate rather than passive subjects of it. This shift didn't guarantee wisdom—people remained capable of foolishness—but it changed the fundamental relationship between citizens and power.

Takeaway

Democracy requires more than voting rights—it requires citizens capable of evaluating information and forming reasoned judgments, which makes education not a luxury but a political necessity.

The Enlightenment's education revolution assumed that access to information was the primary barrier to independent thinking. Remove that barrier through literacy, and people could evaluate claims for themselves. What our current moment reveals is that access was only half the equation.

We now live in an environment of radical information abundance. The average person encounters more written content in a week than an 18th-century scholar saw in a year. But this abundance creates new problems the Enlightenment didn't anticipate. How do you evaluate sources when anyone can publish anything? How do you detect manipulation when sophisticated actors design content specifically to mislead?

The Enlightenment's deeper insight remains essential: the goal was never just reading, but critical reading—the ability to evaluate claims, identify assumptions, detect logical fallacies, and distinguish evidence from assertion. This capacity doesn't come automatically with literacy. It requires cultivation. What we now call "digital literacy" or "information literacy" is the contemporary version of the same project: developing minds capable of independent judgment in an environment designed to overwhelm and manipulate them.

Takeaway

The Enlightenment project isn't complete when everyone can read—it's complete when everyone can think critically about what they read, a goal that becomes more urgent as information becomes more abundant and more easily weaponized.

The Enlightenment bet that educated populations would make better decisions than ignorant ones. Two centuries later, we have enough evidence to call this bet partially vindicated. Literacy correlates with democracy, prosperity, and human flourishing in ways that would have satisfied Jefferson and Kant.

But the project remains unfinished. Teaching people to decode words was the first revolution. Teaching people to decode truth from noise, evidence from manipulation, argument from assertion—that's the revolution our moment requires.