Education and the Second World War

Studies in Schooling and Social Change

Roy Lowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136590153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This was the first book which globally surveyed the impact of the Second World War on schooling. It offers fascinating comparisons of the impact of total war, both in terms of physical disruption and its effects on the ideology of schooling. By analysing the effects on the education systems of each of the participant nations the contributors throw new light on the responses made in different parts of the globe to the challenge of world-wide conflict.

1 Education in England During
the Second World War

Roy Lowe

There is already a considerable literature on the subject of schooling during the Second World War in England, and it is a literature which has thrown up what is not far short of being a historical orthodoxy.¹ In brief, the received wisdom is this; that the Second World War caused enormous disruption to the social services in England, particularly to the provision of schooling which was particularly susceptible to the effects of the German bombing campaign and which suffered from the outset from an evacuation programme which was specifically designed to minimize the effects of the bombers. The general social upheaval caused by the War, allied to the difficulties of keeping schools supplied with basic provisions, resulted in the disruption of an education system which was already before the War suffering from underfunding and parliamentary neglect. The growing realization of a crisis in schooling, allied to a new sense of national solidarity engendered by the conditions of war, resulted in a new willingness to seek collective solutions to these social problems, and in particular in a determination to push through educational legislation which would attack the long-term problems which had plagued popular schooling. Both the condition of the pupils and the condition of the schools needed to be addressed as issues for politicians. The outcome was the 1944 Education Act which sought to universalize schooling to the age of 15 and to open up the grammar schools to working class pupils. The legislation marked a new commitment to schooling which was reflected in the expansion of the education system in the immediate post-War years and in a twenty-year period, extending into the 1960s, during which there was a widespread popular belief in the power of education to transform society and the economy. This, in brief, is the orthodoxy which I will set out to examine in this chapter. To what extent do recent additions to the literature allow us to continue to subscribe to this rather rosy view of schooling during the Second World War?

It is interesting and significant that what has been written so far on education in England between 1939 and 1945 focuses very heavily on a few issues. We have a fair idea by now of the impact of evacuation, and this has led to some kind of awareness of the ways in which for children the experiences of the War were preconditioned by the accident of which region they were born into; there is a full and controversial literature on the background to the 1944 Act; we know far less about the development of the curriculum during the War; little has been written about the ways in which the War impinged on boys and girls differently; we still await a study which looks closely at the ways in which different social classes underwent differing educational experiences during the War. So questions which could tell us much about the origins of attitudes towards schooling which have been evident in the post-War period still await elucidation. Necessarily, therefore, this chapter will, in its emphases reflect the existing literature and will draw from it: this is in essence a historiographical essay which tries to summarize what has been done and which may point the way towards new historical questions. It will focus on three themes: evacuation, the realities of schooling during the War and the politics of education which developed.

Evacuation and its Impact

Evacuation had been planned for in detail since the publication of the Anderson Report in the autumn of 1938, and was introduced as soon as the War began. This first phase of evacuation saw the removal of probably more than three million people from their home areas, most of them children, some nursing mothers. The country was divided into three areas; those thought most likely to be the target of bombing raids were declared ‘evacuation’ areas, the evacuees were removed to ‘reception’ areas thought least likely to be bombed, and much of the country was left initially as ‘neutral’, neither sending nor receiving evacuees.

For a country which was remarkably stable in terms of population movement (as John Macnichol (1986, p. 4) has pointed out, before the War less than half of the population left home for a single night in the year) the effects were traumatic. Although many secondary schools removed lock, stock and barrel to share premises with secondary schools in rural areas, they catered for only a small minority of the school population. For most children involved the effect was traumatic. These younger elementary school children were separated from their families, committed to long train journeys to unknown destinations, arriving tired, hungry and frightened, and then selected at the distribution points and taken alone to the homes of well-meaning hosts who were usually from completely contrasting social backgrounds to the evacuees; it is hardly surprising that the scheme soon provoked strong comment and seemed to be a failure. One London elementary school found its pupils spread over twenty-three villages in Norfolk (Gosden, 1976, p. 15).

In the reception areas, double shift schools were planned to cope with the new demand: in some places triple shifts had to be provided. Meanwhile, in the cities, now emptied of children in the autumn of 1939, school buildings were requisitioned for military purposes. Very quickly children began to drift back to the towns. By the start of 1940 approximately half of the evacuees were back with their parents. But this was a trend which the Government could not publicize or condone without abandoning completely its policy of protecting children from foreseeable air raids. The results were that many teachers remained in the rural areas to which they had been directed, while growing numbers of children roamed the city streets with no formal education being provided for them. Some towns introduced ‘home teaching’ schemes, by which teachers sought out pupils, gathered them together in the best premises available, and gave them one or two hours’ teaching and homework to do.

If the direct effect on the provision of schooling was dramatic, the impact upon public perceptions was even greater. R.C.K. Ensor, the historian caught the middle-class mood of the moment when he wrote in The Spectator on 8 September 1939:

many of the mothers were of the lowest grade of slum women — slatternly, malodourous tatterdemalions trailing children to match.

By the end of 1939 there was a growing number of complaints appearing in the press suggesting that the evacuee children were underfed, sickly, suffered from headlice and impetigo, were prone to bed wetting and in some cases lacking completely in toilet training. Often their behaviour was seen as confirming the worst middle class fears of the existence of a sub-class in the inner cities which was beyond the bounds of normal society. This prejudice was often linked to religious or racial bigotry. Many Jewish children from the East End of London were evacuated to rural Oxfordshire and became the butt of racial prejudice. Large numbers of Roman Catholic children from Liverpool were removed to the rural areas of North Wales where non-conformity remained strong: it is hardly surprising, then, that this was one of the areas which saw a particularly high level of complaints coming in about the evacuee children.

From the side of the evacuees, fragments of letters survive which suggest a heart-rending situation. One family received this note, with only the post-mark offering a clue to the location of their child:

Dear Mum, I want to come home. Pleas come and tak us home.

Or, alternatively:

I hope you are well. I don’t like the man’s face. I don’t like the lady’s face much. Perhaps it will look better in daylight. I like the dog’s face best.

The stark social contrasts and juxtapositions which evacuation involved were summarized neatly by one evacuee who wrote:

They call this Spring. They have one down here every year.²

It seems that evacuation was an experience which in some ways heightened social class differences. The well-dressed and well-fed children were usually the first to be selected at the reception centres; the others were seen as problematic right from the start. One recent article on the subject of evacuation by Angela Preston (1989) suggests, as she puts it, that ‘safety was, in a sense, means tested’ (pp. 231–41). The reality of evacuation in practice probably meant not a growing sense of shared discomfort, leading to a spirit of collectivism, but a confirmation of social distinctions in a particularly direct and painful manner.

All of these patterns were established during the first phase of evacuation, and they helped to ensure that later evacuation schemes were at best a limited success. The governmental scheme announced in February 1940 to evacuate 670, 000 children in the event of bombing raids starting in earnest was put to the test within a few months and was almost completely ignored. In the spring of 1942 Brighton, Hove and Worthing drew up their own evacuation schemes in view of what was seen as an imminent invasion risk. From the summer of 1944 until March 1945 the VI and V2 rocket attacks on London did result in nearly one million children being reevacuated. By this time the public memories of earlier evacuations were too deeply embedded for these children to be welcomed unreservedly in any part of the country. The author remembers an unsuccessful attempt to persuade his family to take in one of a group of London evacuees who had appeared in the Wolverhampton suburbs in the final months of the War.

Nonetheless, historians have viewed evacuation as a key to understanding the coming of a new set of political attitudes in wartime Britain. Carlton Jackson, writing in 1985, has argued that

the domestic evacuation of some three million British children in the autumn of 1939 marked the end of an old Britain and the beginning of a new one. (pp. 26–7)

This is a reworking of the thesis first proposed by Richard Titmuss in 1950 that evacuation ‘dominated social policy for at least the first nine months of the War...and aroused the conscience of the nation’.³ Was evacuation, as John Macnichol (1986) has summarized it ‘a crucial factor in the creation of a wartime reformist concensus’? (p. 8).

There is evidence to support this view. The publication by the Mental Health Emergency Committee in 1940 of Borrowed Children initiated pressure for the provision of expert help for deprived children once the War was over, and was one key factor behind the 1948 Children’s Act which established local authority children’s departments. Travis Crosby is one historian who has argued that evacuation was a catalyst, suggesting that, although class and ethnic prejudice was as prevalent as a wartime spirit of camaraderie, yet the

chaotic conditions in education raised concerns about education in the post-War world. . . These issues helped shape a political climate favourable to the Labour Party. . . Evacuation may have prepared the electorate for the sweeping social legislation which followed the Labour victory’. (Crosby, 1986, p. 145)

Further, Crosby argues, the shock of rejection experienced by many working class families whose children were evacuated may have politicized them enough ‘to draw them into an uncharacteristically active political behaviour’ (ibid, p. 148).

It is worth recalling too that, although the evacuation scheme was actually run by the Ministry of Health, not the Board of Education, it drew officials in both departments into direct planning and control at a level with which they were unfamiliar, and so may have accelerated the drift towards a planned education system in the post-War years.

There is, though, an alternative view of evacuation which has been eloquently summarized by John Macnichol in his recent contribution to Harold Smith’s collection of essays War and Social Change. He argues that

as well as helping to construct an ideological climate favourable to welfare legislation, evacuation also boosted a conservative, behaviouristic analysis of poverty that viewed the root cause of the children’s condition as family failure, poor parenting and general social inadequacy. . . Evacuation, in short, marks the conceptual transition from the ‘social problem group’ of the inter-war years to the ‘problem family’ of the 1940s and 1950s. . .Until its ideological crisis of the 1960s the social work profession was deeply influenced by the ‘problem family’ concept, and many commentators dated the origins of this interpretation to the evacuation revelations of September 1939. (Macnichol, 1986, pp. 24–6)

In brief, while it would be wrong to deny that both directly and indirectly evacuation did help to mould the attitudes which resulted in the 1944 Act and in the rebuilding of the education system after the War, it seems likely that what was essentially a conservative post-War educational settlement owed some at least of its characteristics to the experience of evacuation. The town children who appeared suddenly in the rural areas awoke fears that had been prevalent in the early Twentieth Century of an urban society in decay. Whilst the Eugenicists of the Edwardian era had sought solutions in incarceration and sterilization, the new middle classes of the Twentieth Century turned to social welfare and a revitalized education system which kept the social classes apart. It is not too far fetched to see some linkage between the tripartite system which was introduced at secondary level after 1945 and the experience of evacuation during the early months of the War. One key effect of evacuation may have been to lessen the chances of a genuinely radical reconstruction of the education system.

The Experience of Schooling

Several historians have suggested that one result of evacuation and of the conditions of wartime was that ‘progressivism’ became increasingly the doctrine by which teachers worked, particularly those responsible for younger children. Education became increasingly child centred, and less preoccupied with the rote methods and heavily didactic, teacher-centred procedures that had been general in elementary schools before the War. Brian Simon, quite recently for example, has observed that

the conditions of War, of emergency measures, revealed new, unexpected potentialities among, for instance, the previously neglected. Primary school teachers, thrown back on their own resources in the chaos of evacuation, learnt how much young children could gain from work with improvised apparatus, pioneering group and informal methods of working, and forays into the countryside. Many of the more advanced techniques in our primary schools were worked out at this time. (Simon, 1991, p. 35)

Similarly, Middleton and Weitzmann (1976) suggested that the War allowed progressive educationalists to

press their case that education needed new orientation. It was to cease to be a factory system processing children. . . Education must be synonymous with growing up, a series of planned phases which enabled children to reach their full potential, (p. 204)

The more detailed accounts we do have of curriculum change during the War years give only limited support to these broad assertions. What is clear, though, is that the War saw a growing realization by both educationalists and politicians that among the social changes which would accrue from the War was a new deal for young people, and this was the spirit in which most politicians approached the 1944 legislation. As early as December 1941, a letter appeared in The Times from a grouping of church leaders setting out their view of the necessary preconditions for peace. One of them was ‘equality of educational opportunity’. Within a year the Beveridge Report had identified education as one of the key areas for the establishment of a just society after the War. It is important to distinguish between this growing determination to place education high on the agenda of social policy in the post-War settlement and the realities of what was happening on a day-to-day basis to the school curriculum.

There can be little doubt that, for many schoolchildren, probably the vast majority, the War meant discomfort, shortages of books and materials, changes in the staffing of schools, and a struggle to sustain the curriculum taught before the War. Those pupils who endured evacuation had all the traumas of the complete disruption of their lives to contend with as well.

A nationwide survey at the start of 1940 showed that over 25 per cent of t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Education in England During the Second World War
• Chapter 2 Schooling for Little Soldiers: German Education in the Second World War
• Chapter 3 Soviet Schools in the Great Patriotic War
• Chapter 4 Schooling Uncle Sam’s Children: Education in the USA, 1941–45
• Chapter 5 Education in Wartime Japan, 1937–1945
• Chapter 6 Italian Education During World War II: Remnants of Failed Fascist Education, Seeds of the New Schools
• Chapter 7 War and Educational Reconstruction in Belgium, France and the Netherlands, 1940–47
• Chapter 8 Education as Resistance: The Polish Experience of Schooling During the War
• Chapter 9 War and Peace: The Effects of the World War II on Hungarian Education
• Chapter 10 The Impact of the Second World War on Education in Britain’s Colonial Empire
• Chapter 11 World War II and the Secondary School Curriculum: A Comparative Study of the USA and Australia
• Chapter 12 The Scottish School System, Educational Reform and the Second World War
• Chapter 13 Our Dear Channel Islands’: A Survey of Education in Jersey During the German Occupation, 1940–45
• Chapter 14 Re-education: Remedial Training in Democratic Modes of Thought and Behaviour. The Re-education Scheme of the British Military Government in the Administrative District of Cologne (1946)
• Notes on Contributors
• Index