ABSTRACT
Surveying at least the subsequent educational literature has tended to confirm that Ruskin's conceit was historically by no means an isolated aberration. It was consistent with an existing and to be maintained suspicion and rebuff of American ways, long regarded in British education as exemplifying perils to be avoided. The underlying clash of cultures was to be described by Maclure as 'a source of disquiet and insecurity; a spur to chauvinism, self-justification, complacency' (1968, p. 3). In the post-Second World War period, for example, renewed attempts to introduce social studies into British schools were in part undermined through guilt by association with United States curriculum arrangements (see Chapter 3). Other examples of the collision were evident in the 1960s and 1970s, when the curriculum reforms being disseminated across the Atlantic generated opposing reactions of excitement and antipathy (Gordon, 1979, p. 4). Professor J.1. Goodlad's address at an Oxford International Curriculum Conference in 1967 was said to have left one British participant complaining that he had gone some way to undermining the occasion and making the English delegates 'hopping mad', the abstraction of American curriculum theoreticians and the pragmatism of British teachers and subject specialists meeting head-on (Maclure, 1968, p. 9).
