> While I agree with you about plasticity there's a pretty good counterexample to your claim about literacy: in 1929 Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet, w

> While I agree with you about plasticity there's a pretty good counterexample to your claim about literacy: in 1929 Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet, which never quite fit the Turkish language phonetically, to a Roman script variant that they still use today. This was largely credited to the massive increase in literacy over the next decade (random searches suggest it went from 5-10% to 80%). Claims about the success of the Ataturk's reforms are probably about as credible as Soviet claims about worker productivity. Other sources claim a literacy rate of 68% in 1975: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?end=2016&start=1970 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?end=2016... Of course it can't be denied that school reforms had a massive impact on literacy, but it's not so clear how previously illiterate adults fared when learning to read and write for the first time.