ABSTRACT
The role of education in promoting and inhibiting social change is at once problematical and challenging, but when the social change aimed at or sought lies in the general area of social, economic, political and cultural modernization the connexions of education to the process of change become so convoluted that almost none of the empirical statements in the vast literature can bear serious scrutiny. This less than happy state comes not so much from a dearth of careful, empirical, and often quantitative studies on education and change, but from the analytical opacity of disarray of the frameworks of interpretation. It has taken much work and research energy to overcome the seductive simplicity of the manpower planning model with its restrictive notions of educational demand and educational supply meeting in some smooth equilibrium state where the marginal rates of return to educational investment follow rational capital budgeting rules while the labour force absorptive capacity minimizes unemployment and underemployment of educated persons.
