ABSTRACT
Throughout the war years, from 1939 to 1945 - even though the greatest combatants, the Soviet Union and the United States of America, did not directly enter until 1941 - education was subordinated to the utilitarian role of assisting the various war efforts. Schools, colleges and universities were disrupted, funds reduced to a minimum, textbooks became scarce, and teachers and young students were often assigned to the armed forces or the supply factories. With the cessation of hostilities the long slow process of reconstruction commenced. Learning from the experience of 1919, the victorious Allies exacted no retributive reparations; indeed, reverse ‘reparations’ were provided under the Marshall Plan of 1947 which had the West send supplies and finance to speed the rebuilding of Europe. Concurrently, in a mood of optimism, the Western and Soviet powers masterminded a new version of the defunct League of Nations, which in a Washington meeting of 1942 had been carefully devised as a post-war instrument ‘to safeguard peace and security’. On 26 June 1945 in San Francisco fifty nations signed the Charter of the United Nations Organization, which then established a large number of ancillary economic, social and 523political commissions. In 1946 it created UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, with headquarters in Paris, as its commission charged with coordinating scholarly and cultural development and seeking peace through international understanding.
