Educational Policies Commission

In 1935, the National Education Association (NEA) and the Department of Superintendence accepted the offer of $250,000 for 5 years from the General Education Board to develop long–range [Page 308]policies for American education, and the Educational Policies Commission (EPC) was born. The EPC was to span the Great Depression, World War II, Sputnik, and the War on Poverty before it issued its last report in 1969. Founded to represent the breadth of public education, it aimed, as a reforming agency, to emphasize that American democracy relied on moral and spiritual values, and that the public school was the primary agent in the inculcation of those values in American youth. Much of its early membership came from the NEA, the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), and leading figures in the pedagogical world. During the course of its existence some highly visible Americans, such as James Bryant Conant and Dwight Eisenhower, were active in its work.

EPC's publications, the products of the NEA and the AASA, reflect its mission, as couched in the social realities of the time. During the Great Depression, for instance, it addressed questions such as, “What is worthy home membership?” and “What is a good citizen?” As American involvement in World War II neared, the EPC's publications in 1940 concentrated on the role of the school in a democratic society during the time of global war. Schools, this document asserted, were to impress on their students the “nature and goals of democracy.” Schools were to portray the United States as a nation with “liberty, justice, and opportunity for all.” These values were so important that students should be willing to spare no sacrifice, including giving their lives, in their defense. A year later, in 1941, the EPC published a document on how free citizens in a democracy should be educated. The focus in this publication was on the kinds of loyalty that free people should have and the role of the public schools in instilling these loyalties in their charges. During the Life Adjustment period that followed the war, EPC's attention turned to the civic responsibility that educated citizens in a democracy should embrace.

One of EPC's best–known publications, Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools, ushered in the 1950s. The public schools were to teach a constitutionally permissible form of religion, that of brotherhood, democracy, and equality. As a result, students would be infused with the values of good citizenship that they applied to political processes and civic issues. The schools, the EPC averred, needed partners in this enterprise. Heeding this call, the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) responded with its document that highlighted the parts that home and community, as well as school, should play in inculcating values in youth.

In the 1950s the EPC called on schools, as an integral part of the community, to have as a goal the strengthening of community life. In 1958, in the midst of the cold war and in the wake of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, the EPC stressed the education of the gifted. Taking note of the place of the United States on the world scene in 1959, it focused on developing a national policy of financing public education. It looked to the critical role of schools in the development of the rational powers of each child in 1961.

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