Despite the continued importance of oral forms, the claims made for literacy and education both by early modern reformers and by later historians have been far from modest. We noticed in chapter 4 how difficult it is to explain why and how men and women came to learn reading and writing. In chapter 6 we also introduced the idea that historians have been influenced by a powerful intellectual tradition, which assumes that literacy is automatically a benefit to individual and society, and a value–free one at that. In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Levin's brother Koznyshev asks rhetorically: 'Can there be two opinions on the advantage of education? If it's a good thing for you, it's a good thing for everyone.' This assumption, implicit and explicit, pervades writing on literacy and education.

At the same time the broad outlines of literacy attainments which we demonstrated in chapter 2 are really only a starting–point for understanding the various implications of the ability to read and write. Statistics are important if we are to test our assumptions about literacy and to generate new hypotheses which we can investigate. However, we must also explain the patterns which we uncover and unravel their importance by placing them in the context of the society as a whole. Harvey Graff sums up the importance of context very neatly when he observes that 'The measurement of the distribution of literacy in a given population may reveal relatively little about the uses to which those skills could be put and the demands they could meet.'