Democracy was on trial. World War II was about to begin. Clarifying and preserving the historical and philosophical foundations of public education was important. Developing initiatives in the field of education was imperative. Every statement of educational purposes, including this one, depends upon the judgment of some person or group as to what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false, what is ugly and what is beautiful, what is valuable and what is worthless, in the conduct of human affairs.
Objectives are, essentially, a statement of preferences, choices, values.
These preferences are exercised, these choices made, these values arranged in a variety of ways. Given the context of the book, including the explicit statement about objectives being values, it seems reasonable to assume that these objectives comprised a set of values that educators thought schools should teach young people in the 1930s. The committee to coordinate the Phi Delta Kappa Study of Core Values took the 43 objectives in Carr's book, added 11 more, and posed them all as statements on a questionnaire about values in the schools. At the same time, the committee scoured the literature for value statements that represented the other forces at work in the world in the 1930s, the anti-democratic or authoritarian forces represented by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. These two questionnaires, one containing 54 value statements representing democratic values and one containing 70 value statements representing authoritarian values, were presented to two groups of educators for their responses.