In October 1961 Basil H. G. Chaplin sent an excited letter to A. J. Dowuona-Hammond, Ghana's Minister of Education. Just four years earlier, the nation had won its independence from England. Now, Chaplin wrote, it stood on the cusp of a second great upheaval: “a complete revolution in Science teaching.” As chair of Ghana's Science Education Research Unit, Chaplin had conducted a study of 2,000 Ghanaian children and forty-two teachers over three years. Ghanaians learned best via activities and observation rather than from rote memorization, Chaplin reported, just like students in the West did. “Ghanaian children differ in no way from their British or American counterparts in their initial ability to understand how things work when using their hands and their eyes,” Chaplin told Dowuona-Hammond. “Different cultural backgrounds do not affect ability to interpret their own simple experience.” Too often, Chaplin admitted, Ghanaian teachers snuffed out students' natural curiosity with a rigid diet of lectures and textbook exercises. But the Ministry could change all of that, he insisted, by reforming the curriculum and re-educating the teachers. “It is wholly practical” Chaplin underlined, enclosing his proposed scheme. “Teachers need only a short course of training.”

Writing in this journal in 1993, Marjorie Theobald examined the history of middle-class women's education in late-eighteenth-century Britain and its transference and adaptation to colonial Australia in the nineteenth century. She questioned both the British historical perception that before the middle of the nineteenth century middle-class parents showed little, if any, interest in their daughters' education, and the Australian assumption that the transplantation of the private female academy (or seminary) was simply a reflection of the scramble for respectability by a small middle class scattered among a convict society. Theobald found that, as in Britain by the early 1800s, these schools—all private and run for profit by the wives and daughters of clergy and other professional men—shared a remarkably similar curriculum, generally advertised as “An English education with the usual accomplishments.” This was not, she argued, an elementary education, but rather was rooted in the liberal arts tradition and had been influenced by the search for stability within a rapidly industrializing Britain. The daughters of the British middle classes were to be taught how to deploy their learning discreedy, to ensure that it was at the service of their domestic role and civilizing influence.

In early September 1956, Martha Rutledge—the president of the all-white Alabama State Parent-Teacher Association—released a statement to the press intended to clarify the organization's position on the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the desegregation of schools in her state:

Throughout American history, African American communities have fought for desegregated education, equal school funding, and the right to a quality education. Many activists and scholars have long believed that a racially desegregated education would be the best way to educate citizens in a democratic society. Segregated education has historically been a reality for many African Americans throughout the nation. Before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) successfully won the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court case, much of the attention to racial segregation was paid to the South, although there had been numerous cases fought in the North before the Brown decision. After Brown, the NAACP decided to take their school desegregation litigation to the North in an effort to fight de facto segregation. The federal government also became involved in school desegregation with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Title IV and VI) and through the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and the Justice Department who enforced the act. Court cases, along with the federal government efforts, pushed school districts in the North and South to desegregate.