0 the activity of learning new things on your own that make you a more skilled or able person:
1 learning new things on your own that make you a more skilled or able person:
And, aside from creating problems for accessing employment, low literacy compromises the reform agenda, which rests so heavily on individual self-improvement.
Mid- and late-century improvers came to identify certain outsiders as threatening the very existence of collective self-improvement.
Through his charts and schedules, he outlined his experiment in self-improvement to attain virtue, industry, orderliness, and temperance, among other characteristics.
Indeed, the improved state of the economy would have enabled interested adults to seek self-improvement.
Yet for large numbers of young men, self-improvement was instead a collective venture, most often carried out within the bounds of the mutual improvement society.
Given this tension, one very troubling question for improvers was how to recruit new members without compromising the very nature of self-improvement.
Reformers typically become frustrated by offenders' resistance to their message of uplift and self-improvement.
Such groups were assumed to lack intelligence, self-control and the potential for self-improvement idealized by the middle and respectable working classes.