The Peace Corps: I

Since its begining six years ago tomorrow, the Peace Corps has felt its mission is to bring change. It has been intensely concerned to remain an open society, free from the bureaucratic regulations of the State Department and the Agency for International Development. It has been confident that the work of Volunteers would leave some mark upon a whole country rather than just on the people with whom they worked. With all this, there has been an undertone of hope that the Corps could by example and infiltration carry its brand of flexibility and innovation to the rest of the American government and education.

Yet only recently have the leaders of the Peace Corps begun to talk openly of revolution. They are beginning to think of themselves as militants; they expect to help work major social changes.

The favored child among Corps' projects has become community development, and the aim of CD, says Frank Mankiewicz, Corps director for Latin America, "is nothing less than a complete change, reversal--revolution if you wish--in the social and economic patterns of the countries to which we are accredited." The Corps' job is to "give the people we work with an awareness of where the tools are to enable them to assert their political power."

In the United States, too, there is talk and promise of revolution, especially in the universities, where nearly all of the recruiting and training is done. But for the Volunteer much of that training has been less a preparation for the problems of service abroad than a hurdle to be cleared before being sent abroad.

The Corps seeks to revamp its approach to educational institutions and, in the process, to revive higher education by involving it directly in the Corps' effort to change the world. The final goal, as Corps' Deputy Director Walter Wiggins puts it, is no less than to establish the standard that "today's citizen not only gets his A.B. but also needs to plan two years of service and participation and learning from experience" in the Peace Corps or something like it.

The Corps is by now a secure and established agency of the Government. It has few critics at home or abroad. The Congress has granted almost every request for money that the Corps has made. More than 12,000 Volunteers are now working in 46 countries, and 26 others wait to be filled. Thirty nations have formed voluntary service organizations modeled after the Corps. Volunteers have proved that they can live and work in the worst slums and the most primitive backcountry.

And so the facts go, spiced, in almost every explication by a staff member or returned Volunteer, with proud stories of individual successes--of Volunteers shielded and protected by anti-American rioters in Panama, of Volunteers crossing war lines with impunity during the Dominican Revolution last spring.

But, in any explication, the facts and spice are secondary to the worries. There is almost delight in discussing the Corps' problems, mistakes, failures, in talking of the loneliness, boredom and frustration that are the primary health problems of Volunteers abroad. There is, of course, a catch. What follows is a description of what the Corps is doing to change itself.

Recruiting, selection, and training have been rethought and changed in the past year. The Corps will seek out the activist on campus, go to the unions for blue-collar workers, to 4-H clubs for future farmers. It will try to establish a year-round interest in the Corps on the campuses by sponsoring seminars to be attended by returned volunteers and recruiting professors to serve as advisors overseas during sabbaticals. Starting with about one third of this summer's programs, the Corps will get rid of lectures and role learning in training. It will try to prepare Volunteers for service overseas by substituting weeks of practice teaching or work in slums, and putting more responsibility for learning in the hands of the Volunteers.

Abroad the Corps will take a new look at program planning. New Director Jack Vaughn feels that most of the Corps' initial problems have been solved. To Vaughn the basic problem now is using the Corps' first years of experience in a country to decide where its bottlenecks are, then placing several hundred Volunteers in order to break them. Given enough time and sufficient Volunteers prepared in more effective training programs, "social revolution along democratic lines, not necessarily using the U.S. as a model," should follow.