The Teen‐Age Program: The expansion of a US government experiment in international education from postwar Germany and Austria to the early Cold War world

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the Teen‐Age Program, an international academic exchange program for high‐school‐age students established by the US government in 1949. Relying on dominant American child development theories, the officials who designed this program believed that all secondary school students, anywhere in the world, underwent the same critical period of psychological development during their acutely malleable teen years. They also claimed that all high school‐age students required adequate parental supervision to ensure that they developed well‐adjusted “democratic” personalities during this intense transitional phase from childhood to adulthood. Fearing the influence of what were considered to be authoritarian childrearing practices on secondary students in postwar occupied Germany and Austria, planners designed this exchange program to give select German and Austrian teenagers a chance to experience the American way of democratic living for themselves, by letting American sponsor parents raise these foreign young people as members of their own families for a full academic year. Believing the program was a success by the mid‐1950s, planners decided to expand it to target other secondary school students from world regions of geopolitical interest in the fight against Soviet Communism.