Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics..." (more)
Key Phrases: defense commission, life adjusters, educational relevancy, Cold War, United States, Teachers Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A particular strength of this book is Hartman’s examination of progressive education and the intellectual abuse by conservatives. For readers wishing to examine the crisis in education as America moved into the Cold War, this well-organized synthesis provides an excellent point of departure.”--Ronald Lora, University of Toledo, OH

“The work offers a rich blend of documentary evidence and philosophical reflection.”--Samuel Day Fassbinder

“In contemporary American culture, ‘the conservative 1950s’ have become something of a cliché. Hartman's smart book gives new historical substance to the term, showing us how--and why--our schools turned Right during the Cold War. Even better, he makes us question whether the schools ever really turned back. The ‘conservative 1950s’ might still be with us, in more ways than we are willing to admit.”--Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of Education and History, New York University

“Anyone who wants to fully understand the failure of American schools to prepare free citizens capable of vigorous participation in a democratic society will find here a complex but accessible map.  Andrew Hartman is a wise and sensible guide through the thickets of historical flow, economic structure, political condition and cultural context.  An encounter with Education and the Cold War is fortification for the important struggles ahead.”--William Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago; Author of Teaching Toward Freedom

"Hartman's study makes a significant contribution to the political, intellectual, and educational developments associated with the rise and fall of progressive education. It will appeal to a wide variety  of readers, including upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars of education."--Scott Henderson, History of Education Quarterly

Product Description

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (March 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0230600107
• ISBN-13: 978-0230600102
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,457,479 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Perplexed about Educational Slogans and Progressive Education?, July 21, 2008

By	Textcontext "JMP" (Central Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

Many people will not appreciate this book. Any candid review should help such readers save their precious money and more scarce reading time. It is on this initial caveat that I condition my strong recommendation in favor of this scholarly analysis of a timely and politically charged topic. But if you believe the expenditure of public funds in support of free and secular education to be an inappropriate role for a government; if you think the only proper places to learn to read, calculate, and write are in the church basement or at your own breakfast table, then you should avoid this book. With all due respect, it does not weigh in to your squabble, but presumes public education to be both beneficial and appropriate.

Andrew Hartman, these days Assistant Professor of History at Illinois State University and formerly a public school teacher, interweaves and sustains several complex arguments, the most central of which emerges from a causal analysis of the theoretical developments in the public school curriculum. As one might expect, this analysis includes a detailed description of the socio-political context for successive curricular policies. But it also paints a convincing, if more subtle, portrait of the opposite, the impact of the curriculum on the national political paradigm of the Cold War era. Surprisingly, the resulting conclusions are not so stark as to place either educational curriculum or political concerns into dependable correspondences. Parallel to this historical analysis runs another more philosophical argument about the relative or absolute nature of truth, or at least the way various participants in this venerable debate have been invoked to excuse periodic interventions conducted in both the name of "the child" and for the good of "the nation."

Hartman accomplishes these ambitious goals by focusing on the Cold War Era, but he recaptures the threads of the narratives where they begin, even when it may require a visit to Cotton Mather or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is not a simple story to tell but the tenacious reader will be well compensated.

The book is organized according to developments in the American public school curriculum; therefore it casts only a shadow of chronological order. Since policies and practices of public education rarely moved in uniformity in all regions of the United States and at all levels of government, Education and the Cold War succeeds in achieving coherence by beginning and finishing one story--usually-- before undertaking the next. Not diversions, and certainly not pauses for analysis, these individual pieces of the mosaic are each engaging narratives in themselves. Reconsidered here are important episodes from the careers of educators and administrators, of course progressives like William Heard Kilpatrick and George Counts, but also others, like William Torrey Harris, who resisted the early gains of "child centered" innovations.


Much new ground is cleared here and fallow fields have been productively re-plowed. This book will appear on graduate school reading lists for scholars preparing in education history, curricular theory, American philosophy, and the history of the cold war. I hope that some clever press will entreat the author to conduct a similar analysis of the next generation. This next project would explain how the Cold War era's rejection of "progressive education" morphed into a subsequent crisis, code named, "No Child Left Behind," yet another bugle call to blame the "kids of today" on the progressive school system left, presumably, in the wake of the Cold War. Perplexed?