The Cold War In The Classroom

During the 1950s, leading American scientists embarked on an unprecedented project to remake high school science education. Dissatisfaction with the 'soft' school curriculum of the time advocated by the professional education establishment, and concern over the growing technological sophistication of the Soviet Union, led government officials to encourage a handful of elite research scientists, fresh from their World War II successes, to revitalize the nations' science curricula. In Scientists in the Classroom , John L. Rudolph argues that the Cold War environment, long neglected in the history of education literature, is crucial to understanding both the reasons for the public acceptance of scientific authority in the field of education and the nature of the curriculum materials that were eventually produced. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped resources from government and university archives, Rudolph focuses on the National Science Foundation-supported curriculum projects initiated in 1956. What the historical record reveals, according to Rudolph, is that these materials were designed not just to improve American science education, but to advance the professional interest of the American scientific community in the postwar period as well.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is ‘just history’. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.

Education; Teaching; Education-History; Communication; Russia-History; Europe, Eastern-History; Historiography This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Shortly after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, Hannah Arendt quipped that “only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics.” The Cold War battle for the American school – dramatized but not initiated by Sputnik – proved Arendt correct. The schools served as a battleground in the ideological conflicts of the 1950s. Beginning with the genealogy of progressive education, and ending with the formation of New Left and New Right thought, Education and the Cold War offers a fresh perspective on the postwar transformation in U.S. political culture by way of an examination of the educational history of that era.

A result of an investigative report by tenacious University of Oregon journalism students, Classroom 15 tells the story of how the dreams of fourth-grade students at the Riverside School, Roseburg, in rural Oregon timber country, were crushed by the prevailing Red Scare, McCarthyism, state and societal censorship, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The teacher of Classroom 15, known fondly as Mr. McFetridge, assigned a pen pal project in an effort to take geography lessons outside of the classroom. Imagining a place as far from Oregon as they possibly could, the students wrote letters to nine- and ten-year-old counterparts in the Soviet Union. Janice Boyle, the class secretary, reached out to Oregon’s Congressional representative, Charles O. Porter, seeking assistance connecting with peers in Russia. Representative Porter forwarded the letter to the Secretary of State Christian Herter, and a week later the students received the shocking and disheartening news that their benign request had been needlessly denied. In the wake of McCarthyism, the Eisenhower administration subverted the assignment, fearing Communist propaganda would infect the innocent minds of eager Oregon schoolchildren. The students’ plight quickly gained national attention with stories running from the Roseburg News-Review to the New York Times. The publicity didn’t miss the attention of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. His agents investigated. They traveled to Roseburg, collected evidence, and took it back to the Bureau’s regional headquarters in Portland. The public reaction was swift and unrelenting. The teacher and the Congressman were attacked by outraged Roseburg citizens, the school board, and enraged Americans across the country. Classroom 15 is all the above and a page-turning adventure story told with the voices of the empowered, tenacious University of Oregon journalism students who took the nascent story and demonstrated their unwavering devotion to the journalistic process by telling the tale.

'Here is a vivacious account of how in the 1950s, under Eden and Lloyd at the Foreign Office, some 5,000 young men doing national service were quietly siphoned off from their units, secluded in Cornwall and Fifeshire, or, more boldly, next door to the Guards depot at Coulsdon in Surrey, and put through crash courses in Russian till they could speak it fluently ...' M. R. D. Foot, Spectator Lambasted by the Soviets as a 'spy school', the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) was a major Cold War initiative, which pushed 5000 young National Servicemen through intensive training as Russian translators and interpreters, primarily to meet the needs of Britain's signals intelligence operations. Its pupils included a remarkable cross-section of talented young men who went on to a diversity of glittering careers: professors of Russian, Chinese, ancient philosophy, economics; the historian Sir Martin Gilbert; authors such as Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn; screenwriter Jack Rosenthal; stage director Sir Peter Hall; and churchmen ranging from a bishop to a displaced Carmelite friar. Geoffrey Elliot and Harold Shukman, both of whom emerged from JSSL as interpreters, have drawn on many personal recollections and interviews with fellow students, as well as once highly classified documents in the Public Record Office, in order to reveal this fascinating story for the first time. 'A highly entertaining read ... No one interested in late 20th century theatre or literature can afford to ignore this book.' Spectator 'Elliott and Shukman write with style and wit ... They record something more than a byway in the history of the cold war, a true contribution to British history.' Michael Bourdeaux, Times Higher Education Supplement 'An engaging, quirky account of this strange offshoot of the Cold War ... a kind of Virgin Soldiers for clever clogs.' Michael Leapman, Independent

Few pieces of legislation in recent years have caused as much public controversy as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This book analyzes the passage of this law, compares it to other federal education policies of the last fifty years, and shows that No Child Left Behind is an indicator of how and why conservative and liberal ideologies are gradually transforming. This is a fascinating story about the changing direction of politics today, and it will intrigue anyone interested in the history and politics of education reform. The No Child Left Behind Act, proposed by conservative politicians, was approved by Congress in order to make states more accountable for their education systems and to hold all children to high academic standards. Until quite recently, conservative politicians were protesting federal involvement in schools. Today we find quite the opposite. Starting with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, Anderson weaves a detailed story of political evolution that is engaging, informative, and timely.