THE 1940s: EDUCATION: OVERVIEW

Transition

The 1940s were a decade of profound change at all levels of American education. Primary and secondary education, for the most part underfunded, poorly organized, and inefficient, became more standardized, better organized, and properly funded. Higher education, divided between progressive educational advances and the lingering traditions of nineteenth-century "gentleman's" education, became definitively modern. The new university offered students unprecedented social and academic freedom, restructured its pedagogy to emphasize the sciences, professionalized its humanities curriculum, and integrated its activities with government and industry. American education was in a decade of transition, well on its way to becoming standardized, professional, scientific, and national.

World War II

The major catalyst for these changes was World War II. The war exposed the deficiencies of American education. Millions of draftees were rejected by the army because they were illiterate, and as the army inducted men from around the nation, the degree of variance in their literacy and numeric skills was striking. By war's end, more than five million young men had been rejected for educational and nutritional deficiencies. At the more specialized level, America's universities were found wanting. Foreign-language and scientific training were inadequate, and America's college graduates were ill-equipped for global leadership. Clearly, American education was unorganized and too variable. Educators took notice of the military's complaints, determined to correct the situation after the war.

Impact on Curriculum

The war itself provoked a crisis in education. The many soldiers going off to war left a significant number of service jobs vacant, so the need for technical or vocational training was enormous. While community colleges had existed earlier as feeders to universities, their roles as trade schools expanded after World War II, and two-year degree programs increased. Both the army and navy offered specialized instruction in ballistics, cartography, metallurgy, cryptanalysis, and aeronautics and paid for the advanced education of service personnel at vocational and academic schools. Military necessity, as well as the technological breakthrough of the atomic bomb, led many colleges to revamp and expand their scientific and technical training after the war.

Impact on Teachers

Before the war, teaching was one of the more dismal professions in the United States. Teaching standards varied from state to state, often more dependent upon political contacts than competence, pay was exceedingly low, and social prestige was often lacking. During the war, teachers long dissatisfied with the low pay and minimal benefits of the profession left for more-lucrative work in the military or defense industries. By 1944 authorities estimated that nearly one hundred thousand had left the profession. Many primary and secondary schools closed: two years after the war seventy-five thousand students still had no classes to attend. On the other hand, schools in towns with booming defense industries found themselves badly overpopulated. The schools in Mobile, Alabama, estimated that the influx of defense workers had doubled their prewar enrollment of twenty-two hundred, creating an acute teacher shortage. Many state governments compensated for the drain and shortage of teachers by issuing emergency teaching certificates, but this failed to stem the exodus of teachers from the profession and badly lowered the quality of instruction. After the war overworked, undertrained, and poorly paid teachers would organize into powerful labor unions and strike for better contracts from state and local governments. Their efforts rarely met with public understanding and fueled the "Red Scare" of the late 1940s.

Impact on Universities

The national government, concerned about the decline of the educational infrastructure, responded by integrating education into the war effort, especially at the university level, and pioneered joint government/university/industry projects such as the Radiation Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Metallurgy Laboratory at the University of Chicago, which became models for postwar coordinated research. The federal government spent $117 million on radar research at MIT alone. Such wartime cooperation vastly increased university revenues and suggested to many educators, such as Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant, an increased role for the federal government at all levels of education following the war.

GI Bill

The end of the war also presented challenges for American educators. Millions of veterans needed to be reintegrated into civilian life, so Congress passed the Serviceman's Readjustment Act, or GI Bill of Rights, to give servicemen training and education following the war. The GI Bill paid the college tuition of millions of veterans, who often became the first members of their families to receive a college education. So successful was the program (7.8 million veterans participated) that it packed classrooms after the war, pushing the limits of existing college resources and the patience of college professors. But the program was invaluable in providing professional and vocational education to millions of Americans who might not otherwise have received it.

Secularization

Not all educational issues in the 1940s were connected to the war. Earlier controversies in education continued, such as the debate over religious training in the schools and the differing assessments of progressive education. In the 1940s secularization of the schools had become widespread, but much public sentiment remained favorably disposed toward religious instruction in public education. Many school boards, apprehensive about the distinction between church and state in education, offered religious instruction under the semiofficial contrivance of "released time." In 1945, however, the Supreme Court ruled in McCollum v. Board of Education that any religious instruction by a public school was unconstitutional. The controversy over progressive education received no such definitive conclusion. Progressive education, a pedagogical idea most closely associated with pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, stressed the active participation of the child in the classroom, plural curriculum and educational tracking, and instruction in science and by scientific methods. In the 1930s progressives had opposed educational conservatives who stressed rote memorization and authoritarian instruction in the classroom, as well as educational romantics, some often calling themselves progressives, who saw in the child-centered approach of the progressives license for wholesale social experimentation. In the 1940s the debate became charged with the political disputes of the period, with progressives being accused by the Left as fascistic and authoritarian and by the Right as libertine and communistic.

Segregation

Another continuing problem in education during the 1940s was the continuing segregation of black students from white, and the poor quality of education often found in black segregated schools. School boards, especially in the segregated South, badly underfunded black schools, and the conditions within many classrooms were deplorable. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had begun a program to challenge segregation in the schools in the 1930s. In the 1940s they continued their efforts, seeking a court ruling invalidating segregated schools. NAACP cases such as Sweatt v. Painter (1949) set legal precedents that would culminate in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision invalidating segregation.

Changes

While the debate over progressive education and the problem of segregation remained relatively unaffected by the war, for the most part American education after World War II continued to grapple with the changes set in motion by the conflict. The increased federal role in education was seen by most educators as salutary, and they sought increased federal expenditures for education after the war. They were blocked by conservatives, reeling from the McCollum decision and determined to use the long tradition of local funding of schools as an opportunity to oppose the influence of secularization and progressive education in the public schools. Such conservatives often pointed to the centralized education in authoritarian states such as Germany and Russia as examples to be avoided in America. But progressives also pointed to the war experience in advancing their educational agenda, arguing that the war demonstrated clearly the need for a well-educated polity, versed in social, economic, and political theory. Progressives also increased their efforts to standardize and systematize America's anarchic educational system. There was an increasing need for sociological and educational research to supply data for decisions in such areas as school policies, curricula, and student development. Various sociological measurements were developed to chart the influences of the educational experience upon students. Other educators, noting how little American education prepared its students for the experience of war, advocated a more realistic curriculum in the postwar era. Secondary-school educators and women's-college administrators proposed a "lifestyle adjustment" and "domestic science" curriculum, keyed toward the concerns of the emerging suburbs.

Purges and Loyalty Oaths

Among the more malevolent side effects of World War II was a certain suspicion that one's neighbor, friend, or coworker might secretly be aligned with the enemy and working to undermine democracy from within. While during the war the suspicion was that teachers might be indoctrinating their students in fascism, after the war the fear was that teachers were inculcating Communist ideology among their pupils. In some areas the goal of purging educational institutions of educators and administrators suspected of disloyalty to the United States became a witch hunt. Many teachers in institutions ranging from elementary schools to universities were forced to sign loyalty oaths or risk losing their jobs. The situation became worse during the 1950s, undermining progressive education and often rolling back teachers' union demands for better pay and benefits.

UNESCO

As American educators struggled to rationalize the educational system at home, they also made important contributions to education abroad. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), an "international agency for education to promote understanding and cooperation among the peoples of the world as a guarantee of peace," was created as a result of interest in a meeting of the Council of Allied Ministries and Education in London in 1942. UNESCO supplied funds for libraries and museums, but it also sought to promote global harmony by encouraging dialogue among scientists, educators, and students from all countries. American universities began to offer systematic instruction to foreign cultures. By 1945 several universities, such as Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale, had established schools of international relations and institutes specializing in the study of Russia, Asia, Latin America, France, or Germany. In 1945 American educators opened colleges in Florence, Italy; Biarritz, France; and Shrivenham, England, to minister to the needs of American veterans and to act as research centers for scholars. American educators were also instrumental in reconstructing the school systems of Germany and Japan after the war, launching reeducation programs to counter the authoritarian propaganda of the war years. As the decade ended, American educators were setting the cultural agenda of the United States and the world.