ABSTRACT
The twentieth century brought the world revolution, war, disease and education, all in unprecedented measure. By 2000, although 120 million children were still out of school, another 600 million were enrolled. Teaching had become the largest profession. The expectation that all children should go to school, already the dominant orthodoxy in the north in 1960, had moved from being a political aspiration to a cultural norm in most of the south by 2000. Education had expanded as dramatically at other levels. In 1960 there were six universities south of the Sahara; forty years later there were over a hundred (Domatob 1998: 87, Hinchliffe 1987: 29). Economics came to buttress politics in the expansion of education so that it was seen increasingly as a prerequisite for prosperity and economic growth as well as a means of personal empowerment. Technological changes played their part in this process, creating new demands for workforce training and for schooling that would lay the foundations needed for this. One set of technological changes, in communications, had a dual influence on the process in creating new jobs with attendant educational demands and in enabling educators to do their job in a different way. The growth of open and distance learning forms part of that story of educational expansion.
