The Third World in the Inner City: The Peace Corps and Multiculturalism

Abstract

As liberal policymakers and education reformers set about tackling the problem of poorly performing urban schools in the 1960s and 1970s, they turned not only to the works of progressive education heavyweights like John Dewey or Maria Montessori, or popular radical pedagogues like Paulo Friere, but also to methods and ideas first developed in the Peace Corps—President John F. Kennedy’s experimental program “to promote world peace and friendship” by sending young U.S. volunteers abroad.1 Reformers, federal officials, and local school boards sought to adapt Peace Corps practices for domestic teacher training and hailed returned volunteers as ideal candidates to educate the nonwhite children of the nation’s “slum schools.” Why were returned volunteers singled out for recruitment as urban teachers? And why did the Peace Corps appear to offer a model for teacher training that promised to solve the crisis of urban education? The Peace Corps, I argue, was a...