This timely book examines the complex and varied relations between educational institutions and societies at war. Drawn from the pages of the Harvard Educational Review, the essays provide multiple perspectives on how educational institutions support and oppose wartime efforts. As the editors of the volume note, the book reveals how people swept up in wars "reconsider and reshape education to reflect or resist the commitments, ideals, structures, and effects of wartime. Constituents use educational institutions to disseminate and reproduce dominant ideologies or to empower and inspire those marginalized; or to simultaneously promote both oppression and liberation." The first half of the book explores how students, educators, and communities work within established educational systems to reinforce existing conditions or to promote change. By working through such institutions, these individual sand groups use education to enact, transmit, or resist ideologies. The book's second half looks at how students, educators, and communities work around or beyond existing school systems to promote political and social transformation and to create new educational opportunities in response to conflict. These practices include efforts to create new educational systems featuring alternative curricula, broader access, and improved educational equity. A wide-ranging volume that addresses issues of vital importance within the United States and throughout the world, Education and War fills a crucial void in our understanding of education and its critical role in society. Contributors include Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Charles J. Beirne, S.J., Hanna Buczynska-Garewicz, Fernando Cardenal, S.J., Jocelyn Anne Glazier, Jonathan David Jansen, Susan M. Kardos, Christopher Kruegler, John E. Mack, M.D., Khalil Mahshi, Valerie Miller, Mokubung O. Nkomo, Patricia Parkman, Asgedet Stefanos, David Tyack.

The politically conservative educators of World War II dramatically and rapidly altered policies, programs, schedules, learning materials, classroom activities, and the content of academic courses. They motivated students to salvage materials, sell war stamps, grow crops, learn about wartime issues, and take pride in patriotism. They prepared millions of people for the armed services and the defense industries. These accomplishments were possible because the educators were supported by an unprecedented alliance that included teachers, school administrators, industrialists, military personnel, government leaders, and the President himself. After the war, conservative educators continued to portray themselves as home-front warriors waging a life-threatening battle against enduring global dangers. A terrified public accepted this depiction and continued to back them for decades.

As men and women throughout England were called up for war work during World War II, the country needed to generate as much food and wealth as possible to support them. Children quickly came to be seen as a vital resource. Many children worked the land, planting and harvesting crops, raising money for the war effort, and carrying out a range of other tasks. That war work followed on debates throughout the preceding decades about the character and proper activities of childhood, debates that saw commentators in education and workers' organizations arguing about whether children should stay in school and learn or should combine their education with war-related work. The work of children during the war raised a question that still has relevance today: Should children be conceptualized as citizens of the future or as participating citizens now? That debate has led to even larger questions about the social construction of childhood. As children have increasingly withdrawn from paid and unpaid work, their contribution today can best be understood through their work at school, though that work is often disguised or devalued as mere socialization. The interwar years and the war years in England were a key time for re-thinking childhood, and the issues that were raised then still have relevance to the role of children in society today.