Asking questions is appropriate here, I hope

[rohajavongareth.livejournal.com]

I was wondering how widespread education was in the Revolutionary era and/or the decades immediately prior to that.

To be a little more precise, how many people were actually literate and how was that spread over the different social classes? How much farther than that did the average education go? For example, who would have been able to understand Latin? Would you need to attend a special institution to get that degree of education?

On a related note, how widespread was the knowledge of different political theories? Who would have been well versed in those?