Western correspondents reporting from Tirana, in commenting on Kapo's speech, stated that what actually disturbed the Party most was the persistent opposition of the parents to new social standards set by the Party to regulate and control family life in general and the life of the youth in particular. Standards for dating, mixed Muslim-Christian marriages, engagement of boys and girls within socially accepted classes (the aim being to isolate the children of the former upper classes), and working and living together in various so-called volunteer construction projects were objectionable to parents. EDUCATION Pre-Communist Era As late as the 1940s over 80 percent of the people were illiterate. The principal reason for this was that schools in the native language were practically nonexistent in the country before it became an independent state in 1912. Until about the middle of the nineteenth century the Ottoman rulers prohibited the use of the Albanian language in schools. The Turkish language was used in the few schools that existed, mainly in cities and large towns, for the Muslim population. The schools for Orthodox Christian children were under the supervision of the Istanbul Ecumenical Patriarchate. The teachers for these schools were usually recruited from the Orthodox clergy, and the language of instruction, as well as that used in textbooks, was Greek. The first known school to use the native tongue in modern history was in a Franciscan seminary that was opened in 1861 in Shkoder, where the Jesuits in 1877 founded a seminary in which the native tongue also was used. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, a number of patriots who were striving to create a national consciousness founded several elementary schools in a few cities and towns, mostly in the south, but they were closed by the Turkish authorities. The advent of the Young Turks movement in 1908 encouraged the Albanian patriots to intensify their national efforts, and in the same year a group of intellectuals met in Monastir (Bitolj), Yugoslavia, to formulate an Albanian alphabet. Books written in Albanian before that date used a mixture of alphabets, consisting mostly of a combination of Latin, Greek, and Turkish-Arabic letters. The Monastir meeting developed a unified alphabet based on Latin letters. As a result, a number of textbooks were written in the new alphabet, and elementary schools were soon opened in various parts of the country. In 1909, to meet the demands for teachers able to teach in the native tongue, a normal school was inaugurated in Elbasan. But in 1910 the Young Turks, fearing the emergence of Albanian nationalism, closed all schools that used Albanian as the language of instruction.