The Peace Corps : II

The men who planned the Peace Corps admit that they had very little idea what the volunteer's life overseas would be like, and even less about how to train him for it. But they expectd that there would be many men in the universities who knew enough about particular countries and problems of development to design and direct effective training programs.

Accordingly most training was contracted out to universities and run by "experts" within the institutions.

The Corps took five years to finally decide that academic training, with its endless lectures, rules, and tests, was almost completely useless preparation for life overseas. Until then, though volunteers often complained, the Corps continued to run tightly structured programs which too often discouraged curiosity and initiative.

Finally the Peace Corps committeed itself last year to a complete revision of its training procedures. Returned volunteers began to help design and run the training programs. Trainees helped decide what was to be studied. Discussion seminars to include trainees, professors, returned volunteers, and foreign participants replaced lectures. Time was left for independent study. And the programs included long periods of community action or practice teaching in environments similar to the locale to which the trainees were sent.

These lovely plans have been tried in only a few programs so far, but they seem to be effctive. Whatever may result from the new programs, their adoption is a part of a new attitude of the Corps toward the universities. The Corps` rejection of its old methods of training as irrelevant to a life of active participation in social change is also a rejection of the curriculum of most universities. If marks the beginning of a concentrated push by the Corps to gain a significant role in American education.

In large part the significant point in the Corps' change came at a conference of returned volunteers last spring. Volunteers complained that both their formal education and their Peace Corps training had too little relevance to their life overseas. They asked for roving professors who would meet with volunteers abroad and talk specifically about their life and work.

Those who had gone on to graduate schools chafed at having to conform to specialized curriculums and called for more freedom to concentrate on the non-Western world. They talked of radical interdisciplinary centers devoted to answering the questions of national and personal development which they had confronted abroad.

At a latter conference of educators and Peace Corps staff, the constantly recurring theme was the inability and unwillingness of almost all universities to respond to the Peace Corps. It was agreed that the Peace Corps must somehow subvert the educational institutions infect them with its own spirit.

Essentially the result envisioned is a union of education with an experiential base. The Corps has an involvement with practical action sad a deep commitment to change. The university, while a highly developed system for researching and teaching academic subjects, neglects almost completely its other responsibilities. If does not force its students to grow and change. Unlike the ancient university it is little concerned to think, act, and debate so that society might be reformed and liberated.

As a result the university with all its knowledge could not design and conduct an effective Corps' training program. It wasn't until volunteers started returning with actual experience that training could start to be effective.

"The faculty members of the university" says David Riesman, see the commitment to the Corps as a purely emotional one and...may not recognize the extent to which it creates academic and intellectual interests rather than dispelling them."

In spite of this outlook, the Corps feels it needs the universities-"to understand and guide and research and participate in this crazy experiment," as Deputy Director Walter Wiggins puts it. But just as much, the Corps feels the universities need the Corps. The Corps and the educators who work closely with it are commited to a fusion of education and work. "Their separation," says John Seeley chairman of the department of Sociology at Brandeis, "is a post-Renaissance heresy. The sickness of education and the sickness of enterprise consist in their separation."

If the connection were made, then volunteers would be much more effective, for they would have been educated in an atmosphere of experiment and change. And, it goes without saying, the university would have been revivified, finding new life by committing itself to action.

The Corps has started to plan permanent training centers in some institutions. It will try to involve the university in the continuing education of volunteers abroad, try to get regular credit for courses taken in preparation for training, and try to make Peace Corps service as part of graduate and undergraduate degree programs.

Such is the dream. Very little of it is true now. Interest in the Corps among students and professors is not perceptibly higher now than a year ago when the Corps began its push. The Corps will not get enough qualified applicants this summer to fill the requests made of it. It will not be able to find very many flexible and enlightened campuses on which to establish its new training programs; a significant majority of the training programs will be the same old structured stuff, though doctored with some of the new techniques.

But looming in the future-and what the dream is made of-are hordes of returned volunteers: 50,000 by 1970; 200,000 or more by 1980. No on will venture more than a tentative guess about what their effect will be. Half, if the present ratio holds, will go back to school. Many will get Ph.D.'s and settle in. Working together professors and student, they might create the Peace Corps on campus necessary to fashion the dream.