National School Reform: The Early

Cold War Eraby

Dr. Paul A. Rodríguez

Analytic FrameworkThe Early Cold War Era

Political Economy Schooling Ideology

Cold warContainmentTruman DoctrinePostwar industrialization“Military-industrial complex”GI Bill of RightsNational Defense Act of 1958Slums and Suburbs

Criticisms of public schoolsComprehensive high schoolsGuidance counselingStandardized testing for college admissionCollege preparatory, general, and vocational coursesCommunity colleges

McCarthyismMeritocracySocial mobility AnticommunismEducation for National interestCorporate liberalism

Political Economy and Ideology of the Early Cold War Era Collapse of the stock market in 1929 and the onset of the worst

depression in American history. U.S. mobilization for World War II ended the great depression. The war forced the application of Keynesian principles of deficit spending

that Roosevelt’s New Deal had never fully employed. After the War, U. S. again entered an era of enormous economic growth,

with multinational corporations enjoying huge profits with the tax-based support of the federal government.

U. S. Fear of Soviet Communism The U. S. government feared that unless the Soviet Union’s relentless

march into Europe and Asia was halted, communism would spread around the globe.

They believed that Soviet insurgents would create a political climate antithetical to economic growth and that this would threaten American well-being.

American government officials devised two key policies to slow the Soviet juggernaut.

Under containment, the U. s. declared its intention of taking whatever economic and military means were necessary to stop the spread of communism.

The Truman Doctrine was one manifestation of the policy of containment. U. S. support for French aid to the South Vietnamese in their civil war with

North Vietnam set in motion a series of events that intimately led to the U. S. war in Vietnam.

In the Doctrine of First Use, the U. S. declared its prerogative to initiate nuclear bombing whenever enemy forces, whether nuclear or conventional, threatened American military installations.

The U. S. stockpiled thousands of nuclear weapons at great cost to the taxpayers.

Senator Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society all accused government agencies of harboring communists.

Hearings were held and blacklists were complied to rid the U. S. of “reds” and “pinkos.”

Although fears of communist infiltration lessened considerably after the mid-1050s, for the next two decades American foreign policy continued to be based on the ideological split between the two superpowers and the premise that the Soviets were intent on spreading communism around the globe.

Truman declared, “The whole world should adopt the American system …American system can survive in American only if it becomes a world system.”

Truman believed that than any leftist insurrection was the work of Soviet expansionism and that the “American way of life” of representative democracy and corporate capitalism was therefore threatened by revolution in small nations around the globe.

Protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1060s and early 1079s would later question the foundation of these assumptions, and for a few years during and after Vietnam few educators or policy analysts stressed the link between national security and educational policy. The issue of race discrimination confronted Americans in the post-World

War II era. The Supreme Court declared segregated schools inherently unequal in the

Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. Largely because of the civil rights movement of the 1959s and 1960s face-

to-face discrimination against African Americans diminished and affirmative-action initiatives helped foster a new class of Black professionals and entrepreneurs.

New Liberal Ideology in the Cold War Era Progress continued to be central to 20th-century liberal ideology and was

considered achievable primarily through science and technology. Leaders assumed that the welfare of the U. S. depended on identifying the

select few with superior minds and placing them in positions of authority.

George Santayana had called “provisional freedom,” one that somehow always led back to an orthodoxy that embraced the virtues of American military and economic dominance, meritocracy and social stability.

The provisional freedom as increasingly tied to nationalism. Modern liberals posited a strong central government as the only real route

to freedom, for only “big government” was strong enough to regulate monopolies, big banking, labor organizers, poverty and other internal threats to the freedom of the common person.

Freedom became increasingly identified with “our” way of life, while “theirs” was unfree.

Socialism was increasingly characterized as a “foreign” system of thought, totalitarian and anti-American.

“Free market capitalism” was opposed to “state-controlled economics” in public discourse even though capitalism in the United States had long since ceased to be a free market system.

James Bryant Conant James B. Conant, argued that the talented would rise to the top and the

people could be counted on to defer to this carefully selected intellectual elite.

Conant believed that the category of technicians for whom the captains of industry loom as great men, wisely entrusted with the destines of our social order.

Standardized Testing and Student Selection Conant proposed a National Scholarship Program. T “Conant settled on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Educational Testing Service (ETS) emerged. Closer to Conant’s vision of the meritocratic society.Who Merits a College Education? The GI Bill of Rights provided full college scholarships to all veterans

regardless of their academic “aptitudes.” The GI Bill of Rights indicated America’s unwillingness to accept the

selective principle of education, that Conant regarded as essential in a free and fluid society.

The GI Bill of Rights provided millions of “academically promising” students the opportunity to prove themselves as “late bloomers.”

School Reform Reports and Social Stratification General Education in a Free Society The Educational Policy Commission's Education for All American

Youth A sociological study, Who Shall Be Educated? Conant believed there should be no hierarchy of educational discipline, no

one channel should have a social standing above the other.”

Education in a Divided World Conant stressed the unique function of the American comprehensive high

school.School Reform in the Postwar Era After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, alarming the American public

and making them think that their schools had failed to teach science and math to an entire generation of students, Rickover’s elitist perspective sparked new interest.

National Defense Education Act, of 1958. This allocated millions of dollars for upgrading the teaching of science and

math and improving procedures for identifying and educating gifted students.

The American High School Today.The Great Talent Hunt Conant referred to vocational education as a “motivating force” that would

keep the potential dropout in school, where he would learn the vocational habits and citizenship responsibilities demanded by modern American society.

Slums and Subversives Conant sought a government run by experts with only limited participation

by the masses. The education system Conant had worked for throughout his career would

make an important contribution to shaping what the nation’s citizens would come to take for granted about how high schools should serve the social order.

Terms to KnowThe American School Today life-adjustment educationCommunity college provisional freedomContainment Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)Educational Testing Service (ETS) Senator Joseph McCarthyGI Bill of Rights Slums and SuburbsJohn Birch Society Sputnik