Education and social ideals 1939–1972[ 1 ]

The sense of solidarity in a nation under duress, the dislocations and destruction of the war, and heightened awareness of the weaknesses in the educational system, produced a widely expressed demand that what had been half done before the war should be completed, and a radical reappraisal of educational needs be made. Education and welfare assumed pivotal roles in thinking about post-war society. There was profound agreement on the need to finish remodelling post-primary education, to raise the school leaving age to fifteen (and eventually to sixteen), to implement a system of continued part-time education beyond the leaving age, and to provide adequate health and welfare services for schoolchildren. There was considerable wartime debate concerning the purposes of education; new books about education abounded, and political and educational organizations tried to define objectives for education after the war. One wartime committee, the McNair Committee on the supply of teachers, described in 1944 how ‘the nation as a whole has woken up to the deficiencies of its public educational system . . . we are witnessing one of the most widespread and insistent of popular demands for its reform’. Another committee, the Norwood Committee on the secondary-school curriculum, found it necessary in 1943 to warn against ‘a tendency to assume that because a thing existed before the war it must be changed after the war’.[ ² ]