The work of historians like Thomas Laqueur and Margaret Spufford, for example, has suggested that even in popular cultures that placed a great emphasis on the written word, like that of early modern England, schooling remained a casual and peripheral institution. People learned to read and write without going to school at all, or by attending only sporadically for a short time. Even though the incentives to learn to read and write were, no doubt, multiplying toward the end of the ancien régime, it should not be assumed that sending children to school was a natural response to those incentives. We must keep in mind that the reform of the schools and the rising demand for literacy were simultaneous and connected, but not identical, processes. And even if literacy was increasingly useful in the late eighteenth century, nowhere was it commonly regarded as absolutely essential. The best evidence of this is in the patterns of the intergenerational transmission of literacy. Historians of literacy in both England and Germany have discovered that literate parents sometimes raised illiterate sons, and frequently raised illiterate daughters. There was a certain haphazard quality to the process of handing down the capacity to read and write, apparently not as highly prized as other more tangible components of the family heritage.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 84)