Educational Exchange

Report Outline
Educational Cooperation and Foreign Policy
Growth of Government-Sponsored Exchanges
Long-Term Factors in International Education

Educational Cooperation and Foreign Policy

President's Call for More Aid to Foreign Schools

President eisenhower, delivering a commencement address at Baylor University on May 25, challenged the great universities and private foundations of the United States to undertake “a voluntary effort in people-to-people partnership” which he declared would mightily enhance “the prospects for a peaceful and prosperous world.” Specifically, the President proposed that the universities and foundations help in the establishment of “adequate institutions of modern techniques and sciences in areas of the world where the hunger for knowledge and the ability to use knowledge are unsatisfied because educational facilities are often not equal to the need.”

Eisenhower cautioned that many nations in need of such institutions had rich and ancient cultures. Their traditions and ways must be respected. The purpose of the suggested educational aid should be, not to transplant “the attitudes, the forms, the procedures of America,” but to “help each nation develop its human and natural resources.” The staffing, conduct, and curriculum of each school would be “the responsibility of the people where the school might be built.”

The President viewed an effort by American universities and foundations to help underdeveloped countries in this way as “a dynamic, a fruitful corollary to three elements already effectively at work in our governmental foreign policy.…to our atoms-for-peace program, to our efforts to establish a climate in which universal disarmament can go forward, [and] to our long-sustained campaign for the exchange of knowledge and factual information between peoples.” Direct government participation was not suggested. However, the federal government already participates extensively in international educational cooperation through programs for exchange of students, teachers, and technicians with numerous foreign countries.