Recalling her experience as an exchange teacher in Birmingham, England, in 1938-39, in the midst of the Great Depression, Oregon teacher Mary Kelly, wrote:

The Basque School, as well as a type of school, is an educational phenomenon that emerged and underwent most of its development during the twentieth century. Some initial confusion existed between the terms “Basque school,” “bilingual school” and “ikastola,” due to the undefined nature of the Basque model of schooling during this early period. These schools introduced a new model of education and pursued a common aim: to restore the Basque language and culture. Past research on ikastolas during the time of the Republic shows that the choice of term varied in Navarre according to the school's geographical location. Though there had been earlier initiatives, the Basque schools appeared in Navarra with the advent of Spain's Second Republic in 1931 and survived until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. During the Franco regime, Basques attempted to restart the educational project throughout the whole of Spanish Basque Country. Navarra's first ikastola of this new era was set up in 1963, giving rise to an educational movement that continues to maintain a strong impetus in the new millennium and has become a point of reference for both linguists and educationalists.

All historians must grapple with the complexities of continuity and change. Yet those who study twentieth-century German history face greater difficulties than most, given the variety of political regimes Germany experienced in that era and their major differences in ideology, degree of stability, and relations with their neighbors. Some Germans, such as former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, born in 1913, and former East German leader Erich Honecker, born in 1912, experienced all the changes, from childhood under the Kaiser through World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Nazis' “Twelve-Year Reich” (in exile and prison, respectively), the occupation regimes, forty years of what Brandt called “two states in one nation,” and the (re)unification of 1990.

At the end of World War II, German educational administrators in the Soviet occupied zone of their nation decided to implement coeducation; that is, the schooling of girls and boys in the same classroom. This policy represented a radical break with German educational traditions, as well as with the western German zones' continued practice of gender-segregated schools. The reason for this move was as simple as it was ambitious: educational reformers of the Soviet zone were committed to a new kind of school, one that would offer all children the same education in order to permit active and equal participation of all citizens, male and female, in the “new Germany.” Educators estimated that over 90 percent of school-aged children attended school in the postwar years, approximately 15 percent of the entire population. Major change in young people's education could thus potentially bring about major social reform. Yet coeducation did not resolve the so-called “woman's question” of structural inequality, a theory elaborated by the nineteenth-century socialist August Bebel and of grave concern to the “antifascist democratic, educators of the postwar years. The implementation of the coeducational classroom, although an important move towards erasing gross disparities in educational opportunities for girls, still allowed for and even perpetuated gender-specific educational lessons and experiences.

After 1945, the words “anti-fascist education” appeared much less frequently in the western zones of occupied Germany than in the Soviet zone, but the concerns expressed by the phrase were shared by all occupying powers: How could education help prevent a resurgence of Nazism? For the American and British occupation authorities, and to a lesser extent, the French, the answer was to “reeducate” for democracy. The leaders of German universities in the western zones answered this question differently. Drawing on the traditional German “idea of the university,” German professors stressed the inculcation of morality through Bildung or character formation. In practical terms, this meant very little change in curriculum, course content, or educational structure: Only a rededication to university traditions supposedly uncompromised and unaffected by Nazism could lead German higher education, and by extension Germany, away from fascism.

On January 28,1953, the RIAS-Schulfunkparlament (Berlin Student Parliament) celebrated its fifth anniversary. Despite the distractions of having important West German politicians in their midst as a sign of support, the young parliamentarians handled that day's business with their usual mix of enthusiasm and determination. These elected secondary school students debated five bills that afternoon, agreeing upon four of them. Among those that passed was a commitment to assist in the construction of a new library for pupils living in the Soviet sector of Berlin. Wilhelm-Dietrich von Thadden, a member of the cabinet, reported on his successful work with school authorities to institute the parliament's proposal for changes in school menu offerings. Another representative, Hanna Gätke, informed her colleagues about the Christmas activities of the parliament, which had raised 450 Deutsche Marks for charity and provided over 900 gifts to elderly Berliners. Before adjourning the meeting, the students discussed the activities of student government in each section of the city and continued their debate about the parliament's larger goals.

Within weeks and months of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, numerous busts and portraits of school namesakes disappeared from the foyers, hallways, and “tradition rooms” (Traditionszimmer) of East Berlin schools and were relegated to trash bins. In 1990 municipal authorities formalized this spontaneous purge of school identities by eliminating the names of all schools in eastern Berlin. Over the course of the 1990s administrators, teachers, and students in the newly restructured schools began to discuss a wide range of new school identities.