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Since the end of the Second World War, the growth of education is notable for several reasons. First, the institutions of mass education have spread to virtually all countries despite vast differences in political, economic, social, and cultural organization. Second, rates of enrollment around the world are high and represent enormous financial investments by many impoverished states and economies. 1 And, third, the rapidity of educa tional expansion across states was unanticipated, its speed catching by surprise both theorists and practitioners alike.Functional theories of the right or the left that stress national factors have conspicuously failed, since educational expansion has spanned state boundaries despite great variations in productive capacity and social mobi lization. The functionalist view has generally been replaced by "conjuncturalist" or historicist arguments that local combinations and conflicts of interest and status groups produced expansion. 2 However, historicism, with a focus on local factors, does not explain well a social change that is worldwide.World-level processes seem to be at work. It has been argued that general models of modern society and the nation-state have spread rapidly, with mass education as a derived consequence of the urgency of national integration and development, 14 Others have emphasized the tendency for modern education itself-and the associated model of the individual life course-to flow directly as ideology and practice around 1 P. Coombs, The World Educational Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); Unesco, Statistical Yearbooks

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