I just read an article cleverly titled 'Writing's on the wall' (in a dead tree newspaper so no link). It's a pretty common genre of article though reporting that our children aren't reaching literacy standards.

In my experience these sort of articles always seem to compare test results to an absolute, possibly arbitrary, standard. This article in particular blames teaching methods introduced in the 1970s for poor literacy attainment.

Holding children to a higher standard of literacy is probably a good thing and identifying ways of improving teaching of literacy certainly is. I want to put this issue into some sort of historical context though. My question is: Is there any good evidence that literacy has actually declined or are we merely failing to meet a higher standard?

Edit: I am from Australia but would be interested in responses from other English speaking countries also.