Charles Adam Curle

Charles T. W. (Adam) Curle ticks off statistics on violence and underdevelopment with a curious mixture of weariness and undisguised excitement. Fifty wars in the underdeveloped world since World War II, 40 coups in the last two years alone, deaths, casualties--to Curle, now a professor of Education and Development at the Ed School, each figure is a reprimand and a challenge.

This heavy-set, faintly ruddy Englishman has two professional causes. One is helping to boost the poor nations out of poverty. The other is simply, naively, to eliminate violence, now and in the future.

The objectives sound preposterous, but Curle has pursued them doggedly, and with considerable success. For 17 years, across four continents, he has planned and researched development schemes, and committed his measured, accented phrases to negotiating peace.

In 1964, Curle participated in mediation between India and Pakistan in the wake of their brief, bloody war. He visited Nigeria last summer to study possible solutions to the civil war.

Curle advised the government of Pakistan on social development from 1956 to 1959, and then headed the Education Department of the University of Ghana from 1959 to 1961. Breaking with Nkrumah over the arbitrary dismissal of some colleagues, he came to Harvard in 1961 to co-found the Center for Studies in Education and Development. As the Center's director, he has helped nurture educational experiments in seven underdeveloped countries from Venezuela to Nigeria.

For Curle, secular peace-making is a surprisingly religious affair. Quakerism provides his aversion to violence and his admission to the negotiating table. "Quakers are in a fortunate position," Curle reflects, "because most people think of them as not being anybody's instrument, as being concerned with peace rather than who wins.... Sometimes leaders under pressure like to talk to someone who has no political axe to grind."

Curle is tight-lipped on the negotiations between Ayub Khan and Shastri. When he was contacted--by the British and American Quakers with the "knowledge and consent" of the fighting governments, the U.N. and the State Department--the guns were silent, but barely so. Apparently one of his key objectives was simply to ease tensions. "We were able perhaps to convey expression of opinion which helped understanding a little," he says cautiously. Since there were a whole series of more formal mediation efforts in the works, Curle hesitates to claim credit for any specified accords. He feels, though, that his team--he and two other Quakers--may have prevented some potential disasters by warning the antagonists against specific actions which would have ruptured the tenuous cease-fire.

On Nigeria, Curle will say almost nothing. He admits being there last summer, before the outbreak of violence, "on a mission for the Quakers to look into the political situation." His language on activities since then is even vaguer.

In his international firefighting, Curle comes across as more activist than academic. His conversation emphasizes things done before things thought.

An anthropologist previously, Curle decided after World War II that "I didn't want to spend the rest of my life studying societies. I wanted to study the people who make up society." He returned to Oxford, earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and psychology in 1950, and went to work teaching social psychology at Oxford. But social psychology left him restless. Before long, he switched to education. "Many social ills might be prevented," he argues. "They could be prevented through the wise use of education." Curle transferred to the University of Exeter, teaching education and psychology.

Throughout the period at Oxford and Exeter, Curle had been doing short-term duty for the U.N.: taking two-week trips to underdeveloped countries, preparing reports on social development, and returning to his teaching job. Then Pakistan invited him to take on a full-time advisory post, and in 1956 he left England, joining a Harvard advisory group helping the Pakistan Planning Commission formulate Pakistan's five year development plans. The new job--and his intimate contact with "the appalling suffering of people" in underdeveloped countries -- opened Curle's eyes. "When I got to Pakistan, I found this was quite a different matter [from writing a report] ... I realized the real task was in the getting the report implemented."

The change was dramatic. In 1959, still focusing on education, Curle left Pakistan for Africa, and eight years of planning, agitating, and construction--some in Harvard's name, some on his own steam. A venture in South Africa shows the intensity of Curle's drive. His idea was to build some good colleges in Swaziland and Basutoland--independent black enclaves within South Africa--and get the South African government to let their blacks attend the new institutions. South Africa has a system of higher education for its Africans, but it consists of hopelessly inadequate "tribal colleges" which separate not only white from black, but tribe from tribe. The South African liberals who invited Curle's efforts shared his conviction that the system not only failed to educate blacks, but demoralized them needlessly. Curle in particular saw a powder keg in the situation. Resentment, and more important, the absence of educated black leadership, "would make it more likely that there would be an almost mindless outburst of violence," if and when blacks got the political power they deserve.

Of course, police opposition frustrated Curle's plan. "They gave us sort of a rough time," says Curle, smiling at his own eumphemism.

Curle's commitment to crusading action seems overriding, but his professional bearing--the tweedy outfit, the unkempt sandy-gray hair, the contentment with a soft chair and quiet office--hints at the unshakeable academic. In fact, his range of concerns is startling in its scope.

Curle's twin preoccupations with violence and underdevelopment are drawing him more and more into the problems of America's urban ghettos. Currently teaching African history one day a week in Patrick-Campbell Junior High School--one of Roxbury's worst schools--Curle is increasingly struck with the parallels between the underdeveloped world and what he now calls "the underdeveloped parts of the developed world."

In both areas, according to Curle, poverty, though still basic, has ceased to be the explosive problem. The immediate cause of unrest is the rise and frustration of aspiration--the product, incidentally, of an awareness generated in no small measure by men like Curle. What the telegraph and telephone have done for African blacks, the work of community organizers and OEO personnel had done for American Negroes. Education--in school and out--has driven home the growing gap between the rich and the poor, holding forth a promise of improvement on which society is daily reneging.

In Nigeria, Curle points out, theree quarters of a million students left school last year to fill 140,000 new jobs. The rest are dry tinder, milling in the country's bloated cities. As Curle sees it, the summer sparks in U.S. ghettoes and what he refers to as the "incredible volume of violence in the underdeveloped world" are only hints of the cataclysm brewing in slums and vilages around the globe.

Curle knows he is partly responsible for this. His commitment to education grew originally out of an uncritical faith in the power of schooling to raise the standard of living in underdeveloped nations. In much of its work, he admits, the Center has not given adequate consideration to the effects of its efforts on the expectations of the poor.

But he also points out that this is in part due to inexperience. The whole idea of developing human--as opposed to just natural--resources is very new, both in the U.S. and abroad. Just one facet of this new approach to underdevelopment, educational development on a mass scale, is still in its infancy and will remain immature for some time to come.

Curle remains convinced, however, that education can provide answers to the problems of rising expectation. He will be on sabbatical next semester and hopes to use the time to straighten out his thoughts on how schooling can prepare black children, particularly in the States, for the rude awakening graduation provides. In April, Merril Jackson of Michigan State University's Center for Conflict Resolution is coming to Harvard to work with Curle.

Surprisingly, Curle sees black power in its more moderate forms as another key component of any formula for averting ghetto violence. "I'm in favor of it as I would interpret the term," he suggests. "The black communities are separate communities, and we might as well recognize the fact, and we might as well hope that they would become complete communities as say, Cambridge is." Curle would favor blacks taking over essential community services such as garbage collection or mail delivery--things which whites now do but do poorly. The ultimate goal would be to foster a pride and independence which would permit blacks to negotiate with whites as equals. Though generally pessimistic about the prospects for integration, Curle sees such a greater sense of black identity and confidence as a prerequisite. In support, he again points to the underdeveloped world, this time to Kenya. There, in the late 1950's bitter racial fighting preceded independence. But Kenya's new national dignity permitted the reconciliation of the British and their former colonials. And Jomo Kenyata, at first bitterly condemned by the British for leading the notorious Mau-Maus, now sports a white cabinet minister and has turned into one of Africa's elder statesmen.

Curle's intense involvement has not engendered false optimism. Asked if there is really any way to avoid conflict during modernization's trauma, he replies sadly, "One would hope so but I'm not so sure." But until he knows for certain, he continues, he's going to keep working at "taking the violence out of it."