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Service Learning: The Peace Corps, American Higher Education, and the Limits of Modernist Ideas of Development and Citizenship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2018

David S. Busch
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Abstract

In the early 1960s, Peace Corps staff turned to American colleges and universities to prepare young Americans for volunteer service abroad. In doing so, the agency applied the university's modernist conceptions of citizenship education to volunteer training. The training staff and volunteers quickly discovered, however, that prevailing methods of education in the university were ineffective for community-development work abroad. As a result, the agency evolved its own pedagogical practices and helped shape early ideas of service learning in American higher education. The Peace Corps staff and supporters nonetheless maintained the assumptions of development and modernist citizenship, setting limits on the broader visions of education emerging out of international volunteerism in the 1960s. The history of the Peace Corps training in the 1960s and the agency's efforts to rethink training approaches offer a window onto the underlying tensions of citizenship education in the modern university.

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , November 2018 , pp. 475 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © History of Education Society 2018 

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References

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14 George H. T. Kimble, “Challenges to the Peace Corps,” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1961, 9. The public service rhetoric of university administrators and faculty echo what Charles Dorn sees as the “common good” in American higher education. See Dorn, Charles, For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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