The Conversation | 19 October 2012 Before the second world war, a very small minority of the population in Western societies went to universities. Most were men, most were from the social elite. From the late 1950s that changed. With a growing movement towards gender equality, a progressively larger number of people attended university. Even though there was talk about the value of liberal education and the virtues of a more highly educated population, it is probably true, as British historian Eric Hobsbawm argued in his masterwork, Age of Extremes, that the central reason for the post-fifties growth in universities was the need to train the upper echelons of the … [Read more...]
