Abstract
This chapter focuses on the pre-Second World War international educational crisis along with the various national responses. More specifically, it focuses on the educational challenge posed by the interwar decades, to which there were several, often disparate responses. The chapter also explores the contradictions and tensions engendered by the drive for educational reform during this period, resulting in a common conviction within each of our case study countries that existing science and mathematics curricula and teaching methods were too abstract, being divorced from global realities. The irony is that the reforms, whilst seemingly addressing the key concerns of reformers and many teachers, were to lead to a further crisis over school mathematics and science teaching during the early post-World War two period, with critics now arguing that the curricula and teaching of these two key subjects lacked academic rigour.
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Thesis
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Openshaw, R., Walshaw, M. (2019). Mathematics and Science Equity of the Interwar Years. In: Transnational Synergies in School Mathematics and Science Debates . Palgrave Studies in Excellence and Equity in Global Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28269-1_3
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