Education has been a primary goal of government in Najd since the late eighteenth century, when the Wahhabi movement promoted the spread of Islamic education for all Muslim believers. Because the purpose of Islamic education was to ensure that the believer would understand God's laws and live his or her life in accordance with them, classes for reading and memorizing the Quran along with selections from the hadith were sponsored in towns and villages throughout the peninsula. At the most elementary level, education took place in the kuttab, a class of Quran recitation for children usually attached to a mosque, or as a private tutorial held in the home under the direction of a male or female professional Quran reader, which was usually the case for girls. In the late 19th century, nonreligious subjects were also taught under Ottoman rule in the Hijaz and Al Ahsa Province, where kuttab schools specializing in Quran memorization sometimes included arithmetic, foreign language, and Arabic reading in the curriculum. Because the purpose of basic religious learning was to know the contents of holy scripture, the ability to read Arabic text was not a priority, and illiteracy remained widespread in the peninsula. In 1970, in comparison to all countries in the Middle East and North Africa, the literacy rate of 15% for men and 2% for women in Saudi Arabia was lower only in Yemen and Afghanistan. For this reason, the steep rise in literacy rates--by 1990 the literacy rate for men had risen to 73% and that for women to 48%--must be seen as an achievement.

Women going abroad to study were a particular concern for the ulama in the Department of Religious Research, Missionary Activities, and Guidance. In 1982 government scholarships for women to study abroad were sharply curtailed. Enforcement of the mahram rule, whereby women were not allowed to travel without their closest male relative as a chaperon, discouraged prospective students from studying abroad. In 1990 there were almost three times as many men studying abroad on government scholarships as there were women, whereas in 1984 more than half were women. Education in Saudi Arabia is free but not compulsory. In the 1996 school year the nation had 11,506 primary schools with a total enrollment of 2.3 million pupils; secondary schools listed 1.5 million students. Some 94% of Saudi adults were literate in 2001, a dramatic increase from the less than 3% literacy rate in the early 1960s.