Under Salazar the number of elementary schools grew from 7,000 in 1927 to 10,000 in 1940. While the illiteracy rate under the twenty years of the First Republic had only dropped a modest 9%, under Salazar in twenty years, the illiteracy rate dropped 21%, from 61,8% in 1930 to 40,4% in 1950. In 1940, the regime celebrated the fact that for the first time in Portuguese History, the majority of the population could read and write. Nevertheless Portugal's literacy rate by the 1940s and early 1950s was still low for North American and Western European standards at the time.