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‘The World’s Schoolmaster’: Educational Reconstruction, Grayson Kefauver, and the Founding of UNESCO, 1942–46

The United States government sought to foster peaceful and stable democracies in Europe following the Second World War, especially in conquered enemy territories. This essay illuminates the tensions underlying that project by examining an important element of American foreign policy during the war era—the reconstruction of educational systems in war‐torn Axis and Allied nations. American educators during the war years, led by Stanford University School of Education Dean Grayson Kefauver, successfully convinced the US State Department that democratic educational systems in Europe were a prerequisite for postwar international security, an idea that led to the founding of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Conceiving of education as a cooperative enterprise, however, Kefauver and his colleagues encountered a significant dilemma while championing their proposals: how to advance educational reforms in foreign nations, particularly fallen totalitarian states, without violating the democratic principles they claimed to promote. It is the author’s contention that educational reconstruction was ultimately undermined by its proponents’ inability to identify and institutionalize an acceptable alternative to coercion, one that would serve the causes of both diplomacy and democratic education. This essay is dedicated to John McGeehan—teacher, mentor and friend.