Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School

Andrew Hartman, PhD ’06, offers a fresh perspective on the post-Cold War transformation in U.S. political culture by way of an examination of the educational history of that era. Shortly after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, Hannah Arendt quipped that "only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics." The Cold War battle for the American school — dramatized but not initiated by Sputnik — proved Arendt correct. The schools served as a battleground in the ideological conflicts of the 1950s.