ABSTRACT
We have said in chapter 1 that the expansionist perspective that sustained the first two decades of post-war thinking and practice in education was made up of two strands: an evaluative or moral strand, concerning the values that should be realised in a reconstructed society; and an explanatory strand that offered an account of how these values might be realised in practice. Both strands led to a programme aimed, among other things, at the extension and the equalisation of the opportunity to profit from education. Whatever the conceptual difficulties with the ideas of equality and opportunity, and however varied the reasons for pursuing them, doubts about these objectives were out weighed by the way in which they expressed people’s hopes for the post-war world, and thereby mobilised political will. People who emphasised the right of access to education as a universal entitlement of citizenship found themselves in agreement with others who emphasised the benefits for economic growth or for political and social order. Conflicts of purpose remained latent, because expansion seemed to offer an explanation of how several purposes might simultaneously be achieved.
