ABSTRACT
For a premodern society, Tibet appears to have had an extraordinarily high literacy rate. Although it is difficult, in the absence of any reliable statistics, to arrive at anything better than a most general estimate, any study of Tibetan society and its social and professional strata indicates that a large percentage of the population had acquired at least the basic ability to read and write and a substantial number of people had, through years of study and application, achieved a highly sophisticated humanist education in the Tibetan framework.
