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.

In an era defined by political polarization, both major U.S. parties have come to share a remarkably similar understanding of the education system as well as a set of punitive strategies for fixing it. Combining an intellectual history of social policy with a sweeping history of the educational system, Daniel S. Moak looks beyond the rise of neoliberalism to find the origin of today's education woes in Great Society reforms. In the wake of World War II, a coalition of thinkers gained dominance in U.S. policymaking. They identified educational opportunity as the ideal means of addressing racial and economic inequality by incorporating individuals into a free market economy. The passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 secured an expansive federal commitment to this goal. However, when social problems failed to improve, the underlying logic led policymakers to hold schools responsible. Moak documents how a vision of education as a panacea for society's flaws led us to turn away from redistributive economic policies and down the path to market-based reforms, No Child Left Behind, mass school closures, teacher layoffs, and other policies that plague the public education system to this day.

This book shows that education does not only prepare war, but defines its character for future generations. Pointing out the intricate interconnetion with the various practices of education this volume offers in-depth studies of war and education in several chronological and geographical contexts. Tying in with the latest state of the art the authors offer examples for education for war, education in war and education for reconciliation in the aftermath of wars from a global perspective.

America's latest war, according to renowned social critic Henry Giroux, is a war on youth. While this may seem counterintuitive in our youth-obsessed culture, Giroux lays bare the grim reality of how our educational, social, and economic institutions continually fail young people. Their systemic failure is the result of what Giroux identifies as ""four fundamentalisms"": market deregulation, patriotic and religious fervor, the instrumentalization of education, and the militarization of society. We see the consequences most plainly in the decaying education system: schools are increasingly desi.

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.

Learning War examines the U.S. Navy’s doctrinal development from 1898–1945 and explains why the Navy in that era was so successful as an organization at fostering innovation. A revolutionary study of one of history’s greatest success stories, this book draws profoundly important conclusions that give new insight, not only into how the Navy succeeded in becoming the best naval force in the world, but also into how modern organizations can exploit today’s rapid technological and social changes in their pursuit of success. Trent Hone argues that the Navy created a sophisticated learning system in the early years of the twentieth century that led to repeated innovations in the development of surface warfare tactics and doctrine. The conditions that allowed these innovations to emerge are analyzed through a consideration of the Navy as a complex adaptive system. Learning War is the first major work to apply this complex learning approach to military history. This approach permits a richer understanding of the mechanisms that enable human organizations to evolve, innovate, and learn, and it offers new insights into the history of the United States Navy.

This book presents an overview of the democracy movement and the history of education in Nepal. It shows how schools became the battleground for the state and the Maoists as well as captures emerging trends in the field, challenges for the state and negotiations with political commitments. It looks at the factors that contributed to the conflict, and studies the politics of the region alongside gender and identity dynamics. One of the first studies on the subject, the book highlights how conflict and education are intrinsically linked in Nepal. It illustrates how schools became the centre of attention between warring groups and how they were used for political meetings and recruitment of fighters during the political transitions in a contested terrain in South Asia. It brings to the fore incidents of abduction and killing of teachers and students, and the use of children as porters for arms and ammunitions. Drawing extensively on both primary and secondary sources and qualitative analyses, the book provides the key to a complex web of relationships among the stakeholders during conflict and also models of education in post-conflict situations. This book will interest scholars and researchers in education, politics, peace and conflict studies, sociology, development studies, social work, strategic and security studies, contemporary history, international relations, and Nepal and South Asian studies.

"Teaching About the Wars breaks the curricular silence on the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Even though the United States has been at war continuously since just after 9/11, sometimes it seems that our schools have forgotten. This collection of insightful articles and hands-on lessons shows that teachers have found ways to prompt their students to think critically about big issues. Here is the best writing from Rethinking Schools magazine on war and peace in the 21st century."--Publisher's website.

There is a huge volume of work on war and its causes, most of which treats its political and economic roots. In Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War, Nel Noddings explores the psychological factors that support war: nationalism, hatred, delight in spectacles, masculinity, religious extremism and the search for existential meaning. She argues that while schools can do little to reduce the economic and political causes, they can do much to moderate the psychological factors that promote violence by helping students understand the forces that manipulate them.

This book provides an overview of the relationship between the sweeping social changes of the post-war period and education in England. It outlines the major demographic cultural and socio-economic developments which made new demands of the education service during the twenty years following the War and analyses the responses made by schools, colleges and universities. The book provides not only an informed narrative of the development of formal education, but also an authoritative account of the ways in which suburbanisation and the growth of the new property-owning middle class determined both the rhetoric of education and the structure of the system which emerged through the implementation of the 1944 Education Act.