Professor Jacques Barzun suggested in The Teacher in America (1945) that the United States does not possess the best of all possible educational systems.

Myrtle Hooper Dahl, president of the National Education Association in 1941, led its annual convention in planning a national teaching employment service, a teaching program to educate ten million illiterate people, and a plan to train teachers of other subjects in math and science.

In 1940 Clarence A. Dykstra was granted an indefinite leave of absence as president of the University of Wisconsin to serve as the U.S. director of the Selective Service.

In March 1949 Albert Einstein published a portion of his autobiography. In the excerpt he discussed his own education and his repugnance for learning only to pass examinations: "It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled...