Behavior for Crusaders

Dropped into Berlin one morning without guide or direction, the young man in search of education floundered in a mere mess of misunderstanding.

So wrote befuddled Bostonian Henry Adams about his first trip to Europe in 1858. Until recently, most Americans were hardly better prepared than Adams was to face the languages, customs and currencies of the countries they planned to visit. But more and more U.S. citizens today face the prospect of living abroad for extended periods during their lifetime, as students, diplomats, businessmen or Peace Corps volunteers. Training them to cope with alien habits has become a burgeoning new branch of American education.

One of the best trainers in the business is the Experiment in International Living in Putney, Vt., which this summer is preparing 2,700 Americans for life in 44 different lands. The Peace Corps is relying on the Experiment to prepare 174 volunteers for duty in Afghanistan, Brazil, and Iran, has sent it 1,500 trainees in all since 1961. A score of colleges and universities, including Pomona and Dartmouth, count on it to manage their overseas studies program.

At the same time, the school also serves as a welcoming center for 2,000 foreign students preparing to live in the U.S. Among them are members of the State Department-sponsored Volunteers to America, a kind of "reverse Peace Corps."

Hard Knocks. The Experiment's training programs for the Peace Corps, which last as long as twelve weeks, are a common-sense blend of inventiveness, idealism and practical pointers. Languages, ranging from Iran and Afghanistan's Farsi to Yugoslavia's Serbo-Croatian, are taught by natives in classes of ten or fewer, using audio-lingual techniques developed by U.S. Army language schools. Training officers for the Peace Corps are generally about the same age as their students, frequently have fresh but forceful ways of preparing them for expectable hardships. To give . her 28 Afghanistan-bound charges some notion of what they face, Anne Janeway, 30, deprived them of chairs, beds, eating utensils, showers and Western-style toilets. She even staged a mock wedding, Afghan-style, between a girl volunteer and an Experiment staffer.

One goal of the Experiment is to purge its trainees of any notion that their problems can be solved by calling the nearest U.S. consulate or American Express office. Thus most Peace Corps trainees go through "Operation Drop-Off," whereby they are simply put down in a big city or an isolated New England town with a few dollars, told to penetrate the "local culture" and survive for up to two weeks on newly formed friendships. Initially, the hazards of the project were more apparent than its benefits. Two Iran-bound trainees could find lodging the first night only in a jail, while one frightened girl sat numbly in a general store all day, afraid to ask for help, until a clergyman came to her rescue.

Home Stays. The Experiment in International Living was founded in 1932 by Donald B. Watt, the son of a wealthy department-store owner from Lancaster, Pa. Originally, Experiment did little more than arrange for students to board during summer vacations with amenable European families, after giving them a brief and genteel orientation on how to act politely overseas. Under Watt's successor, former Colgate Administrator Gordon Boyce, the Experiment still handles more than two thousand students bound for summer "home stays" the world over, but the emphasis is increasingly on good works as well as foreign family living. Some of the Experiment's home-stayers are building an international youth camp in the French Alps, while others are conducting a health survey in Nigeria, teaching English to secondary school children in Japan.

In addition to its other projects, the Experiment has just launched an International Career Training Program, a 15-month course (tuition: $3,000) blending academic study, home stays and travel designed to train men and women for employment abroad by government, business or foundations. In the future, the Experiment hopes to develop other programs specifically aimed at service to the underdeveloped world. "I am convinced that the latter half of the 20th century," says Boyce, "will be looked upon as equal to the Crusades or the great migrations in the movement of men and ideas among nations."

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