But despite frequent references to their own assiduous efforts to pursue learning for religious or political or economic ends, early modern memoirists from the general populace rarely regard lack of learning as a stigma. Only when schooling had become the norm and the gospel of literacy had begun to spread, do we begin to get reports of a sense of shame associated with illiteracy, as, for example, the late nineteenth-century Parisian weaver who "was embarrassed and suffered because of her ignorance."

In a similar vein, Laqueur has argued that in England by the mid-nineteenth century, literacy:

came to be associated with the process of individual self-improvement that was an integral part of radical political and social change; it was part of the working class's rise to political power and its defense against oppression [but at the same time] it came ... to be a mark distinguishing the respectable from the non-respectable poor, the washed from the unwashed. It served to sharpen a division which was far less clear in the eighteenth century.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 146)