ABSTRACT
This chapter examines concepts and ideas of intellectuals, philosophers, politicians, and especially mass communication researchers, about the role of schools, education and governmental propaganda and their aims to reach national homogeneity, coherence, or even conformity, in the United States in the twentieth century. Debates about the ideals of social harmony and community were not restricted to the United States. They still had great and global attractiveness at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially the communist utopia of classless equality. However, this utopia ended in so-called collectivism, which was a stark contrast to equality because a small but powerful circle of communist leaders divided the society into comrades and varmints. Despite violent ordering of society in the first half of the twentieth century, European totalitarian governments did not renounce education, but rather focused their attention on school instruction as a tool for stabilizing socialist and national community and forming allegiance prospectively.
