The transitional phase between the processes of achieving widespread literacy and those involved in mass school attendance is a sure indicator of the final phase in the construction of modern Nation States. We employed two methods to better understand the way in which modernity was gradually constructed in Portugal by looking at the processes via which access was gained to written culture: a) on the one hand we carried out a systematic analysis of the data about the acquisition of widespread literacy contained in the Population Censuses that cover the period between 1900 and 1960, broke them down by age groups and organised them in populational cohorts; b) on the other we reconstructed the means of access to the world of the written word used by four generations of the population of four Portuguese parishes, stretching from the end of the 19th century to the mid 1960's, as a way of illustrating and deepening that which the overall figures in the Censuses made it possible to deduce. These data, which are still in the interpretation phase, nonetheless enable us to very clearly determine the relationships that existed between the processes involved in the move to mass school-attendance and the modernisation processes, while simultaneously helping us to understand how the way in which Portugal became peripheral to the process of the construction of western modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries was reflected in the country's economic and scholastic fields.