Earlier this month I returned home from a Worldwide: trip visiting, Ghana--in Nigeria--in Pakistan--in India--in Burma—in the Philippines—to name just a few--one request was always the same send us teachers.
There is a significant point in these requests which has often been overlooked: the leaders of these nations have entrusted us with the teaching of their young. No nation that doubts the Peace Corps mission would open the minds of its young to our representatives.
President Nkrumah of Ghana, a man who has often been critical of the United States, asked for Peace Corps Volunteers to teach in Secondary schools throughout his land. I regard this as one of the highest compliments the Peace Corps has received.
Similar confidence was reflected by men like Premier U NU of Burma and Prime Minister Nehru of India.
Each Chief of State praised our educational system not only for our –advanced teaching methods, but because of our ability to turn out a Whole Person.
In India, Ashadevi, a spirited woman associate of Gandhi, traveled three days and three nights on a train to warn us: “There is a great valuelessness spreading in the world,” she said.
Your Volunteers must not add to this. They must bring more than science and technology. Your Peace Corps must touch the idealism of America and bring that to us.
And that is the reason that these great men of the world ask our people into their classrooms to teach their young. It is a great responsibility and a great challenge. It is not a job we can do without the help of every man and woman in this, room tonight.
From all across America we must recruit the best the educational community has to offer. We must also find those teachers who have abandoned education and gone into other fields and those qualified teachers who have their certificates but have never entered teaching.
America must share its wealth of teachers in the same way that we have shared our mineral and industrial wealth with the rest of the world, I understand our great need for qualified teachers here at home but we must now regard the lesser developed nations of the world as “here at home.” That time has come in history.
Just this week our selection boards picked 70 candidates to prepare for secondary teaching positions in Ghana. The selection was completed over the last weekend and the telegrams went out asking for those who could accept to report for training in seven days.
We stressed that due to the nature of this project, there would be no home leave after training was completed. We were asking them to decide within 24 hours if they wanted to leave their homes for over two years to complete their business in seven days and report to California.
That is a lot to ask of the talented Americans we selected. But they responded. Those few who could not wind up their affairs so quickly asked, almost pleadingly, if a refusal now would prevent them from entering another Peace Corps Project.
Just let me tell you a little about the men and women who responded. There is Cyrus Gibson from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He’s a design engineer for Standard Oil, but he is qualified to teach mathematics and advanced calculus. He graduated from Yale where he taught informal classes as a freshman counselor. In 1959 he was an exchange engineering student in England and he has traveled in Liberia and Nigeria.
There is Tom Peterson of Wilmette Illinois, a teaching assistant in Greek and Roman culture at the University of Wisconsin. He is proficient in foreign languages and history and has already traveled in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Then there is George Hamilton of Arlington Virginia, a Harvard graduate. He has traveled widely in Europe, speaks French fluently and has a working knowledge of Spanish and German. He is an active outdoorsman with a broad range of interests. Over the past few summers he has worked as a machinist, a cartographer and a waiter.
There is Patricia Bellamy from Bakersfield, California who spent the past academic year as an instructor in the School of Education at Florida State. Her specialty was teaching English to high school students in a demonstration school. She has a teacher’s certificate.
Bill Austin is from Bennington, Kansas where he has spent the last two academic years teaching world history and coaching football and basketball. He received his undergraduate degree in history from Kansas Wesleyan University where he was co-captain of the football team and vice president of the student council. He has worked summers as a laborer in a grain elevator and as an agricultural field hand.
Marian Frank is from Pittsburgh year doing graduate work and working part-time in a news bureau. She was a top student at Oberlin College where she received her B.A. in mathematic. She has also Studied at the Sorbonne and the Institute de Phonetiques in Paris and at the University of Gottigen in Germany. She was born in China and has traveled widely.
I’ve often been asked why these young men and women join the Peace Corp. After all, I am told, what we are offering flies in the face of many of the mores of our society. We are offering a hard life at little pay. We are offering long hours, unknown frustrations exposure to exotic diseases.
Well, the reporters asked our first Volunteers the same question and their answers are revealing.
Mathew DeForest is a truck driver from Chicago.. He has only a high school education but scored among the highest on our tests. His skill is that he knows how to handle a bull-dozer and machines. He has spent time in Mexico and studied Spanish. He was a little shy in answering, reporters on why he joined the Peace Corps. “This may sound corny,” he said, “but I think our first duty is toward God---then toward our country and then toward ourselves. I think the Peace Corps is good because it can help us serve all three.
“We need to retell our story in this world. We have to communicate somehow with the people in other countries. We have to show them what Americans are really like. And the only way to do that is to have Americans go to those countries and show them.
Terry Grant is from Salem, Oregon and he will be going to Colombia. At college he worked as a part-time veterinarian. He has skills in animal husbandry, agriculture and carpentry. When asked about the Peace Corps, he told reporters: “O felt the Peace Corps was a good answer, or an attempt to answer, the world’s problems. I think I can do some good in it.
“Young people have a better realization of the part the people of the United States must play in a world community. They understand better than some of their elders that we have to get along with all people all over the world.”
Mike Lanigan is the son of a Marine General. He has a background in public health work. He told reporters: “It’ll be a good feeling to pack up and go somewhere to do something worthwhile.”
James Lovejoy said “We’re so extremely rich, here in the United States--I mean culturally rich----that we’re almost obligated to let the pot overflow.”
Tim Lemmuchi said: “The Peace Corps gives me a chance to take part personally in a now foreign policy experiment which is both practical and noble.
These are the kind of young men and women that the world leaders praised when they hailed our educational system for developing the “whole” person.
So far the Peace Corps has officially announced two teaching projects, one in the Philippines and the other in Ghana. In the weeks ahead, several others will be announced.
The Volunteers l spoke about earlier will be going to Ghana. Before, they were accepted they participated in a long and comprehensive selection process. It began when they filled their questionnaire and submitted their references. This was followed by a five and one half hour test of the Volunteer’s language aptitude, his intelligence and his general skills.
At the training site the Volunteer takes his physical and psychological examinations.
However, no Volunteer is finally accepted until after the training period is completed. In other words, the entire training period is a continuation of our selection process.
Our 70 candidates for Ghana w study at the University of California for eight weeks. Classes will run six days a week beginning at 8:00 a.m. and continuing until 10:30 p.m.
The Volunteers will study Ghana’s economy, geography, culture and traditions her modern history and government structure. Special emphasis will be placed on preparing the Volunteers for teaching under the Ghana system of education. Although English is commonly used and will be the language employed by the Volunteers in the classroom, they will learn something of the Twi language.
American studies, an important area of the program, will draw upon Berkeley faculty members for lectures on American education and institutions, on the historical evolution of the United States---its government, economy culture and democratic ideals.
Also included will be courses in international affairs and health. Volunteers will learn basic first aid and rules of preventive medicine.
Assembling to teach the Volunteers are the nation’s top experts on Ghana. They are all professors at American universities. They represent the four different disciplines: sociology, Political science, anthropology and government. They are without doubt the best informed people in Ghana in the United States.
One of them is David Apter, a professor of political science at Berkeley. He lived in Ghana for two years, and has made annual trips there for the past seven years. Apter is the author of “Gold Coast in Transition, a number of scholarly articles, and a new study on Ghana to be published shortly.
Another is Sinclair Drake, a professor of sociology at Roosevelt University in Chicago. For the past three years he has been chairman of the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana. He was a Ford Foundation fellow studying mass communications in West Africa in 1954 and 1955.
Gray Cowen has just set up the now African Institute at Columbia University and is the Executive Secretary of the African Studies Association.
The others are equally as qualified.
Following the California study another month’s training will take place at the University College of Ghana at Legon, a few miles outside Accra, the nation’ a capital on the Gulf of Guinea.
When their training is completed, the Volunteers will teach mathematics, English, chemistry, physics, biology, general science and French in Ghana’s secondary schools. They will be supervised by Ghana’s Ministry of Education and the headmasters of the schools to which they are assigned.
At the start of the school year the Volunteers will move into their bungalow homes on the various Ghanaian secondary school campuses.
The Volunteers will live in twos and threes in these bungalows. Typically a bungalow for junior faculty members comprises a sitting room, study, dining room, kitchen bath and two bedrooms. It has electricity and cold running water. There may be a vegetable garden for the Volunteers to maintain. Living conditions are better here than in most of the projects the Peace Corps will undertake this year.
The day in Ghana starts early for the Volunteer. By 7:30 a.m. the Volunteers begin teaching their classes of about 30 students each. Some of the schools run through until 2 p.m. with only a half-hour break in mid-morning for “brunch.” About 4:30, when the heat has somewhat subsided, the Ghanaian students engage in, sports or the manual work on campus that is required of all students.
Volunteers May coach volleyball, football, rounders (a game like our baseball) and basketball and tennis.
After dinner volunteers will take turns with Ghanaian teachers supervising study in dormitories, the library and the laboratories.
For the Volunteer who still has not filled his or her week, there are University College extension courses to tutor. There are also community art councils, literary circles, social clubs and discussion groups.
We at the Peace Corps can sense the urgency of Ghana in pressing for fuller education and we will do our part to help. But we also need your help. Here’s what you as teachers and future teachers can do to help.
1. Insure that the curriculum, at all levels, educates our people about the changing nature of the world in which we live, about the threats to our way of life both from without and within. Let them learn about the nature of our commitment to the people of the lesser-developed nations and of the necessity for young people to have both an educational and practical exposure to other cultures, economic systems and political philosophies.
2. Make sure that all Americans begin learning a second language as soon as possible. It is cultural failure to send Americans to French and Spanish-speaking countries without some knowledge of these languages.
3. Use your influence to induce member institutions to grant leaves of absence to their superior people to complete limited Peace Corps assignments abroad. The eventual success, or failure, of the Peace Corps will depend, to a great extent, on our ability to attract the best-qualified and the best motivated people to fill overseas supervisory assignments.
There is another side to the Peace Corps coin. Here’s how we can help you:
1. The Peace Corps presents a unique government experience. Not since TVA and Point Four has the government embarked on such a program. This is the practical laboratory for the teacher, an opportunity to watch first hand the impact of a new organization on the governmental process.
2. The Peace Corps can serve as the motivation for your students who ---in general course of things---might not ordinarily be interested in international relations. In preparing to serve, they will be preparing themselves for a fuller and richer life. I urge teachers to prepare pre-Peace Corps educations programs in both high school and college. Language and study of the lesser developed areas of the World would be the bedrock of such a program.
3. The Peace Corps will enrich the entire educational process. The returning students may seek careers in teaching where, before their exposure, they might not have learned of the rewards of teaching. Teachers who volunteer will be better equipped to serve as deans, principals, administrators and professors.
And, above and beyond these values, the Peace Corps presents the teacher with an opportunity to serve our nation abroad in a time of crisis and need.
Our educational system is the touchstone of our freedom. With our help perhaps the educational systems of the lesser developed nations will be their touchstones of freedom too.
The Peace Corps “moving ahead on the New Frontier.” I hope I will see many of you there with us.
