ABSTRACT
The curriculum debate between educational traditionalists and innovators that raged in the late 1940s and early 1950s had its analog in several earlier eras of American educational history. Most Americans greeted the end of Second World War with relief as well as expectations of material improvement. Yet the period from 1945 to the mid-1950s was full of uncertainty because of crises in both domestic and foreign affairs. These crises were so monumental that one historian, Eric Goldman, referred to these years as a "crucial decade." The progressive education movement after Second World War continued to employ a number of different child-centered curricula that paid little attention to life outside schools, except when needing outside support for a specific curricular change. American Education onset of the twentieth century had offered substantial evidence that the United States was a very different, more complex, nation than could have been envisioned by those who framed the Constitution.
