This just in !

 [The latest in our ongoing series of “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.]

We seem to be developing into a nation of lookers and listeners  rather than readers.

… The decline in reading ability isn’t confined to dullards and the indifferent.  An Eastern university that chooses the best from a long list of candidates for admission  gave a reading test to its students  on two occasions, twenty-five years apart.  The test showed that freshmen could read as well in 1925  as seniors in 1950.

  -- Malcolm Cowley, “Some Dangers to American Writing” (1954).

Since that time, half a century past, things have only grown worse:  The average graduate-student (and there are more of these now than there were college students back in 1925, or students of any sort back in Tom Sawyer’s day) cannot name any letter of the alphabet beyond “B”.

However, using these yardsticks and working backwards in time, we can conclude that, in Colonial days, the average American infant was born already reading Sanskrit and reciting “O Captain, My Captain” from memory.