The 1940s-1980s were a special era in the history of the school in the USSR, as well as in the countries of Eastern and Western Europe. In the post-war era, the school on both sides of the Iron Curtain faced a number of difficult problems, to which teachers, students, and education administrators had to respond. The response to this crisis has been the rapid growth of new educational institutions and a host of projects and programs to reform education, often utopian. The authors of this collective monograph consider several important ideas embodied in state and local educational initiatives of the post-war period. new collectivism, individual approach to the child, polytechnic school, a combination of planning and creativity in the organization of education . The collection also deals with continuity and breaks with the pedagogy of previous periods (1900-1930s), the fate of various disciplines of the school course, as well as the image of school and schoolchildren in literature and cinema. The articles of the collection are devoted to school education and extracurricular forms of organization of children in the republics of the USSR, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Sweden and Germany.