Why didnt people in the middle ages learn to read and write?

Answer 1

Don't let anyone fool you. In the middle ages, people learned to read and write. Not all did, but a lot did.

The middle ages began in 476, 410, or some similar date depending on who is talking, and they ended on 1453, 1492 or some such. The Byzantine Empire, which called itself the Empire of the Roman People, and was the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which supposedly fell in 476, started the first public school system in 425 and kept it going until 1453, when it finally did fall. The reason they did this was because they wanted all military personnel to be able to read and write.

The oldest state run school in the world is Beverley Grammar School, which was founded in 700 AD in what was Northumbria at the time in the time and is now part of Yorkshire. This is really interesting, because it meant that the school survived in an environment where the state was run by Vikings for quite a long while. There are a total of over 70 currently operating schools that were founded during the middle ages. How many other schools were founded that subsequently closed is unknown. And this figure does not include the more than 70 universities that were also founded.

Speaking of Vikings, who do you suppose taught them to read and write runes? Well we can guess it was not the Church. And we know it was not the Church that taught Muslims in Spain to read and write in Arabic script. Most European Jews were literate during the middle ages.

And merchants, regardless of religion, had good reasons to keep records. There were towns all over Europe called communes that were operated for the interests of merchants, there were great banks founded by such groups as the Medici family, and there was the Hanseatic League, which was as powerful as some countries and run by merchants.

There have been a lot of revisions made to European History that have more to do with politics than with serious research. Some of these have come from the greatest Universities. If you want to know the truth of things, my suggestion is that you not take blanket statements, such as, "Only the clergy and a few nobles were literate," for granted. The middle ages happened in a continent during a period of a thousand years, and a lot happened in that time in that place.