A Book Review of Adjustments in Education To Meet War and Postwar Needs

Abstract

Written and published during the Second World War, Clifford Woody’s edited volume titled Adjustments in Education to Meet War and Postwar Needs demands a critical introspection and analytical eye of the prevailing educational system to prick out the systemic failures and the needed “adjustments” to resolve the existing issues, as the title of the reviewed book suggests. Armed with the benevolent intent of probing eight different subfields of education, the ongoing war forced the volume to discuss only six of the eight subfields, which does not cause the volume to be lacking, content-wise. The work dared to provide insights, albeit repetitive in frequency, on the subfields of: History of Education, Philosophy of Education, Educational Sociology, Educational Guidance and Counseling, Educational Measurement, and Teacher Education (Curriculum), within the context of the period they are in and its anticipated immediate aftermath. It also goes without saying that there is no defense to be made of the authors’ arguments with relevance to their prejudices concerning the Western hemispheric-centric approach to education and the role of women and minority groups in postwar society, in addition to their epistemological trespassing and their uneconomic use of the book, which severely diluted their concerted attempt to expound the topic at hand.