The First World War placed a high premium on the patriotism and efficiency of all sectors of British society. Sooner or later all the nation's resources, including transportation, mines, and factories, were placed under strict government control, and the lives of all its people subjected to a degree of central regulation undreamed of prior to 1914. Thousands of ordinary elementary schools provided most of the nation's industrial and agricultural workers and fighting men. Inexorably, and perhaps inevitably, during the four years of continual crisis these schools sought to inculcate attitudes that would strengthen national resolve and to intensify activities contributing materially to the war effort. Indeed, the schools became totally subject to the demands of war, and rightly so in most people's eyes.

The history textbook reform in Allied Occupied Japan, 1945–52, was one of the major education policies designed to demilitarize and democratize pre-collegiate Japanese education. Since 1952, however, both history textbooks and the textbook system that certifies them have been extremely controversial. In the post-Occupation period Japan's Asian neighbors have criticized Japanese history textbooks for covering up Japanese wartime aggression in Asia. And in Japan textbook writers and teachers have repeatedly challenged the textbook certification system as unconstitutional. Ironically, the leading protestor was the very historian who had contributed to writing the first reformed history textbook under the guidance of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). Although the purpose of this article is to highlight and analyze the issues involved in the textbook reform, it also proposes to show how education policies became embedded in larger political and ideological concerns, how Japanese society resolved its textbook conflict, and how academic issues and educators were used and abused in the process of public school textbook writing.

Ever since Arthur Jensen touched off the so-called “IQ controversy” with his famous 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review, most spokesmen for the educational aspirations of minorities and the lower classes have been highly critical of mental testing. Jensen's determination that 80 percent of the variability in IQ scores was due to innate, genetic factors and his suggestion that little could be done to increase a person's IQ substantially raised fears that support for compensatory education programs, such as Head Start, would be undermined. Consequently, critics began to challenge the assumptions of the testing profession and to explore the harmful effects of testing in the schools, concluding that these instruments restricted the educational opportunities of minority and underprivileged students.