The Inaugural Tom Haddox Visiting Scholar: Matt Seybold

"Institutions of Literacy"

Over the course of the 19th-century, U.S. literacy rates skyrocketed thanks to the creation and continuous expansion of infrastructure that included, but extended well beyond, educational institutions. It would be a mistake to assume that the mass literacy which resulted can be sustained without maintenance of that infrastructure, or that the infrastructure of literacy is universally celebrated and defended. To scrutinize the attainment of mass literacy is to recognize the pursuit of deliberate deliteracy.