ABSTRACT
The difficulties and hardships imposed by wartime conditions and which have already been described inevitably produced a loss of educational efficiency in many schools and districts. On the other hand the prevailing circumstances presented many new opportunities. Individual teachers sometimes found themselves able to break out of the formal structures which had so largely conditioned their teaching and to try more informal methods. Educational administrators, politicians and members of the public were all driven to think anew about the fundamental needs of education. On the one side the conditions of these years often made it more difficult for the schools to reach the children of socially inadequate families whose standards of literacy worsened and who in the earlier phases of the war provided many of the victims of the de-schooling process in the cities. Yet on the other, among the more socially aware the schooling of their children assumed a new importance which was reflected in an increasing — if still small — proportion of the age groups seeking to stay longer at school and to take public examinations in the later years of the war. War is often said to have a unifying effect upon a nation and no doubt in many ways it does, but the war of 1939-45 apparently had the effect of increasing both the proportion of children who got very little and the proportion who got a great deal from the schools. In other words, the war seems to have had a polarising effect in increasing the size of these minority groups at the two extremes.
