Certainly, the forty year impasse of the cold war meaning of nuclear age and the space age paralle l could be argued as distinct. The end of colonial dependency and the proliferation of new nations speak to a watershed of modern. We have seen, for example, that national policy to create emergency refo rm can be traced to the early 1930's. The belief in centralized controls and mass scale carried over to World War II military application. When events are compressed upon one another, it is difficult to determine what is a more sophisticated iteration of a previous pattern and what is a truly novel transformation.
Truth is probably an issue of predominance instead of an either-or situation in most cases.
It was not until the end of the second world conflict and the G.I. bill for returning veterans that the idea of universal access to postsecondary instruction became popular. Descriptions of best included the systems with the largest central office bureaucracies and most developed professional teacher associations. Third, the idea of organized teachers meaning a worker union similar to other parts of municipal government or the private sector is a post world war phenomenon. Another change that has become common to the description of the past fifty years is metropolitianism. After World War II, the conventional thinking of rural and city environments was dramatically modified by the suburb.