Education And The Second World War Education In England During The Second World War

This was the first book which globally surveyed the impact of the Second World War on schooling. It offers fascinating comparisons of the impact of total war, both in terms of physical disruption and its effects on the ideology of schooling. By analysing the effects on the education systems of each of the participant nations the contributors throw new light on the responses made in different parts of the globe to the challenge of world-wide conflict.

Education for Democracy in England in World War II examines the educational discourse and involvement in wartime educational reforms of five important figures: Fred Clarke, R. H. Tawney, Shena Simon, H. C. Dent and Ernest Simon. These figures campaigned for educational reforms through their books, publishing articles in newspapers, delivering speeches at schools and conferences and by organizing pressure groups. Going beyond the literature in this key period, the book focuses on exploring the relationship between democratic ideals and reform proposals in each figure’s arguments. Displaying a variety of democratic forums for debates about education beyond parliament, the book re-interprets wartime educational reforms from a different perspective and illustrates the agreements and contradictions in the educational discourse itself.

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, University of Potsdam (Anglistik), course: Britain during World War II, language: English, abstract: It might count as a fact that facing the terrors of the Second World War, the British population must have been quite indifferent to mathematic formulas and a correct spelling. Naturally, one is tempted to conclude that for the duration of the war all schools were closed but the whole opposite was true. Schools were evacuated over and over again and despite bombed out classrooms, a short supply of teachers and material, lessons were continued both to maintain the illusion of normal life and to demonstrate resistance to Nazi- Germany. It will be thus interesting to examine the educational, social and personal problems children were exposed to during the chaos of evacuation and to investigate how school life changed under the difficulties of World War II. Furthermore, it will be important to ask how the experience of war and evacuation shaped the hopes and expectations of British people for post-wartimes. Responding to these questions there will be given evidence for the assumption that the experience of evacuation and schooling during the war had not only a traumatic effect on most children, but has also contributed to raise public awareness of the shortcomings of the socially divisive educational system and thereby served as a catalyst for the educational reforms of the 1940s that culminated in the 1944 Education Act. The first part of this paper portrays the three major phases of evacuation and describes how the problems that occurred with the billeting of the evacuees at their host families' homes contributed to the growing awareness of social differences. The second paragraph will deal with the realities of schooling during the War. A particular emphasis will be put on the problems that accrue from the shortages of school buildin

The Second World War stands as the most devastating and destructive global conflict in human history. More than 60 nations representing 1.7 billion people or three quarters of the world’s population were consumed by its horror. Not surprisingly, therefore, World War II stands as a landmark episode in history education throughout the world and its prominent place in school history textbooks is almost guaranteed. As this book demonstrates, however, the stories that nations choose to tell their young about World War II do not represent a universally accepted “truth” about events during the war. Rather, wartime narratives contained in school textbooks typically are selected to instil in the young a sense of national pride, common identify, and shared collective memory. To understand this process War, Nation, Memory describes and evaluates school history textbooks from many nations deeply affected by World War II including China, France, Germany, Japan, USA, and the United Kingdom. It critically examines the very different and complex perspectives offered in many nations and analyses the ways in which textbooks commonly serve as instruments of socialisation and, in some cases, propaganda. Above all, War, Nation, Memory demonstrates that far from containing “neutral” knowledge, history textbooks prove fascinating cultural artefacts consciously shaped and legitimated by powerful ideological, cultural, and sociopolitical forces dominant in the present.

Following on from Public Schools and the Great War, Sir Anthony Seldon and David Walsh now examine those same schools in the Second World War. Privileged conservative traditions of private schools were challenged in the inter-war years by the changing social and political landscape, including a greater role for the alumni of girls’ public schools. What was that public school spirit in 1939 and how did it and its products cope with, and contribute to, the requirements of a modern global conflict both physically and intellectually? The book answers these questions by, for example, examining the public schools’ role in the development and operations of the RAF in unconventional warfare and code-breaking. At home there was bombing, evacuation and the threat of invasion. Finally, the authors study how public schools shaped the way the war was interpreted culturally and how they responded to victory in 1945 and hopes of a new social order. This fascinating book draws widely on primary source material and personal accounts of inspiring courage and endurance.

This book deals with the development of private secondary schooling during the Second World War in Belgium. It focuses on how the German occupier used education to gain acceptance of the regime, and discusses the attitudes of Belgian education authorities, schools, teachers and pupils towards the German occupation. Suggesting that the occupation forced Belgian education authorities, such as the Roman Catholic Church, to take certain positions, the book explores the wartime experiences and memories of pupils and teachers. It explains that the German Culture Department was relatively weak in establishing total control over education and that Catholic schools were able to maintain their education project during the war. However, the book also reveals that, in some cases, the German occupation did not need total control over education in order to find support for some authoritarian ideas. As such, Van Ruyskenvelde’s analysis presents a nuanced view of the image of the Catholic Church, schools, teachers and pupils as mere victims of war.

This was the first book which globally surveyed the impact of the Second World War on schooling. It offers fascinating comparisons of the impact of total war, both in terms of physical disruption and its effects on the ideology of schooling. By analysing the effects on the education systems of each of the participant nations the contributors throw new light on the responses made in different parts of the globe to the challenge of world-wide conflict.