Aside from the home, the school was considered the optimum environment for children to learn the values that kept America strong and the skills that would enable Americans to rise to the task of meeting and matching the Soviet threat. The school was also a source of great anxiety. The primary anxiety centred on fears that the American system of education was inferior, in a variety of ways, to that of the Soviet Union.

Initially, however, most of the reports of Russian education that appeared in the press depicted the Soviet school system as inferior to the US system and in dire need of improvement. One story that appeared in an Iowa newspaper early in 1949 argued unequivocally that Russian education compared poorly to American education in nearly every way. The Council Bluffs Nonpareil informed readers that the Soviet Union suffered from a shortage of both teachers and school buildings. Russian teachers were described as poorly paid, both in comparison to American teachers and to Russians employed in other occupations. Even worse, a large portion of the Soviet Union's population went without even a basic education. Ignoring inequities in the ability of many American children to secure access to good education largely as a result of poverty and racism, the Nonpareil reported that, while all children in the US finished elementary school, no more than 30 per cent of Soviet children remained in school after the first four years.