ABSTRACT
It is only recently, and only by hindsight, that we have been able to appreciate the enormous stresses imposed upon the schools in the immediate postwar era. The most visible of these was demographic in origin. There was an extraordinary increase in the number of youngsters to be educated, requiring a vast expansion of the public schools, and ultimately of the colleges and universities. That expansion was carried out remarkably well, or so it seems to me; there were strains, inevitably, but these were compensated for by a sort of euphoria about doing so much so energetically in so short a period of time—not merely the building of physical plant but the recruitment and training of a large body of teachers and administrators, It was a euphoria that extended to the idea of education itself. Education came to be seen as a sort of universal solvent for the problems of the polity. The Utopian tendencies in the American mind were to some large degree invested in the schools, in the notion of perfectibility through learning. As we shall see, there was to be a great fall, indeed one we are still witnessing, but I think it is fair to say that through most of the 1950s the authority of the schools rested upon a sense of inner confidence—they believed in themselves because we believed in them, and we believed in them because they were the repository of so many of our fondest hopes, for ourselves, for our children, for the nation.
