Editor’s Introduction

The editors are pleased to present this special issue of the journal, dealing with war, education, and schooling in Europe in the twentieth century. The first three articles were originally papers offered to a panel for the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER 34), which was held in Cadìz, Spain, in 2012. The conference theme was ‘The Need for Educational Research to Champion Freedom, Education and Development’, and the panel examined ways in which education was used as a political tool in the conflict between totalitarianism and democracy in twentieth-century Europe. The resulting articles discuss both educational reform under totalitarian rule, and the use and role of education in post-war reconstruction. The ECER conference in general aims at bringing together European scholars (or non-European scholars working on European research subjects), and it is a pleasure to publish such work, including the work of early-career historians who are working in languages other than English. The additional article came to us fortuitously at around the same time, and deals with some of the same issues in the context of the Winter and Continuation Wars of 1939–45 in Finland.