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I don't know if educational standards, overall, have declined or if the 'average' person today is less clever, or less well educated, than her/his counterpart of previous generations.
I believe that those skills which are valued by the ruling class as important (for those who serve) receive emphasis while those that are of limited utility for the day-to-day operations of commerce and state are pushed to the margins.
In that era before the creation of the mechanical typewriter, but after the birth of large scale capital and modern, bureaucratic government, it was necessary to employ people (in great numbers) with excellent penmanship and the ability to write clearly.
Young men - insert a Dickensian hero as a model - wishing to get ahead in life, would dedicate themselves to acquiring these skills, for they could be the ticket to a middle class existence.
A happy co-product of this would be a large cohort of literate people who were familiar with the mechanics of writing and who, in their leisure time, might seek out journals and newspapers of high quality.
Technological changes in the manipulation of words, images and numbers made much of this high-level writing skill redundant. Businesses de-emphacized the need for people who were familiar with the classics and began pushing (via, for example, the sorts of articles you read in Time about 'job winning skills' and so forth) for what are essentially low-level technicians; people who could "process information" through the medium of command and control technologies such as computers.
The prime mover unmoved, in both the present circumstance and the previous, haloed era, was Capital. It is the requirements of the rulers which determine, in large part, the curriculum of the ruled.
DRM
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