(10-19-2014, 06:34 PM)Bumo Wrote: That's really interesting. Looking at the prosperity of the three city-states, you'd assume the literacy rates would be high, at least within the cities proper. Low literacy rates would imply that there is no compulsory education system; any kind of tutoring then would depend on wealth and social status. Books themselves would be expensive because of this as well--if you look at the cost of books in England during the Middle Ages, where education was primarily for nobility, it would take nearly a decade for an average craftsman to earn enough wages to purchase a book.A great deal of why books were so expensive and rare though is because of how they were created. Printing presses changed that and by the 18th century and 19th century books and especially novellas became so easy to obtain that in many cities around London books could be borrowed on an honor system (I can't remember what they called those kind of bookstores though - they weren't quite libraries since they mostly dealt in cheap penny-novels that were primarily fiction).
Given the blend of genres that have always defined the FF series, I would be willing to pay good money in betting that Eorzea has printing presses: they have guns, astrological equipment, and steamworks afterall, and I believe newspapers have been mentioned before (though I might be mistake). This would tell me that books are more common-place than compared to real-life medieval Europe.
At the same time, though, if there is no formal education system then it makes perfect sense that most Eorzeans are still illiterate: it's simply an uneven distribution of education rather than wealth, and for the working civilian, much like it was for much of human history, knowing how to read doesn't help you put food on the table so it isn't something a lot of common folk bother to learn. Despite the presence of machinery and technology, Eorzea still seems to be a mishmash of technological periods that never quite reach the Industrial Revolution, thus the city-states remain largely agrarian and why perhaps education is still not widespread.
Quote:It's interesting to think of from a character point of view; coming from a literate society in real life, where there is a formal education system, most people probably automatically assume that their characters can read, unless they want it to be a notable part of their background that they can't. But that bit of lore says that most people in Eorzea can't read, and so people whose professions or social standing didn't demand learning letters probably don't know how.
This is a common issue with the Fantasy genre in general: people can't or don't want to wrap their minds around living standards and paradigms that do not mirror the present, industrial world. It's why so much of the genre itself has become diluted with an over abundance of easy-living high fantasy versus the gritty hardships of low fantasy (I'm more of a low-fantasy kinda man myself).
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