A concern with the prerequisites for and consequences of mass educational development has been a recurrent theme in both the history and historiography of those societies where knowledge and skills based on literacy were regarded as preconditions for power and economic growth. Systematic comparative study of this interplay has been devoted in large measure to educational correlates of nation-building and economic growth since 1950. Economic historians and others have drawn renewed attention to a similar range of phenomena in the preindustrial West and Japan.

Partial explanations for the differential timing and tempo of mass as opposed to elite literacy diffusion in preindustrial settings have been constructed from variations in the content and articulation of role, ritual, and belief systems within and between the major world religions. Thus, Western religions of The Book have, in principle, been more conducive to mass literacy than Eastern religions of The Way. Egalitarian organization combined with inner-worldly life orientations produced a literate laity well before reading skills were required by new technologies or an expanding electorate. Where less egalitarian modes of religious role organization prevailed, as in the state churches of Germany and Scandinavia, popular education was promoted, initially, by laicized or lay-oriented varieties of Lutheran pietism in tension with Orthodox clericalism as part of absolutist styles of administration.