The World Educational Revolution, 1950-1970 论文

摘要

This paper's focus is on the extremely rapid expansion of educational enrollments that occurred throughout the world between 1950 and 1970. The universal expansion of education during this period led us to construct diffusion models and to explain this process as a consequence of the population characteristics of educational systems. Estimates of these models show that such a self-generating process explains much of the variation in educational expansion. We then test the effect of economic, political, and social characteristics of countries on educational expansion. The results show that cross-national differences in levels of economic, political, and social development do not explain much of this massive post-war expansion of educational systems. Rather, between 1950 and 1970, education has expanded everywhere as a function of the available population to be educated and of the level of education existing in 1950. We conclude by speculating that the causes of this expansion lie in characteristics of the contemporary world system, since such characteristics would affect all nations simultaneously.