Are you saying that Adam Smith's writings was representitive of the views espoused by all the American framers and philosophers of that era?

How does the survival rate of someone who has reached the age of 14 have an effect on literacy and citizenship?

Here's your original point:

> It was understood that the main purpose of education was not to create factory workers, but to have critically-thinking and informed citizens in a republic

Are you saying the seminal book in economics documenting at the time of the Declaration of Independence that having children in the Western world was to help you get rich (opposite was going on in China) was incorrect?

> How does the survival rate of someone who has reached the age of 14 have an effect on literacy and citizenship?

It doesn't, but when your literal survival is against the odds and you're task every day is to maintain sustenance, I'm not sure your comment about a whopping 99% rate literacy hold water.

> Are you saying the seminal book in economics documenting at the time of the Declaration of Independence that having children in the Western world was to help you get rich (opposite was going on in China) was incorrect?

Leaving aside whether I agreed with that point about children being there to make you rich (I don't), or whether everyone in America agreed with that (I doubt it), and we're just looking at the various colonists (excluding the Natives) making up the 13 colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence, I don't know if that would be considered the seminal book to the point that it influenced how education is viewed. I see (at least according to Wikipedia), it had influenced Alexander Hamilton, but I also think Hamilton in many ways was ahead of his time. It is my understanding though, that those ideas become much more commonplace in the mid- and late 19th century.

> ... when your literal survival is against the odds and you're task every day is to maintain sustenance, I'm not sure your comment about a whopping 99% rate literacy hold water.

So I am to understand that you are saying, because conditions are so harsh, there is very little time to do things like studying or reading?

A curious thing happened in the Midwest in the early 1800s. Land was divided in a way where schools and colleges were deliberately set aside so that children would have access to it. For every N plots of land, there would be a school; for every M plots of land, there would be a college. I don't think any other region of the US was divided like this. The educated farmer, at least in the Midwest, is a thing.

That bit came from an article by someone observing that the Midwest seems prototypically boring, without characteristic. They were trying to explore just what makes the Midwest the "Midwest". The essay was not written as a criticism of the education system.