EDUCATION: How to Melt Freud's Ice Cap

What we found wrong with a lot of early Peace Corps training, based on reports from returned Volunteers, was that it contained "too many lectures, too much one-way instruction and too little direct experience."

That statement by Harris Wofford, Peace Corps Associate Director for Planning, Evaluation and Research, marks the main thrust of a new Education Task Force.

Its purpose: to make Peace Corps training more like the overseas reality and less like a mere extension of classroom education.

"Freedom and responsibility are what Volunteers generally find overseas," notes Wofford, who heads the Task Force. "But for some of the most unstructured jobs in the world we have put together some of the most structured training programs."

He says Freud's description of child-rearing has applied to much of Peace Corps training: "We train them for the tropics and send them to the polar ice cap."

The Education Task Force is designing new 1966 programs that will concentrate on starting processes of learning that will continue overseas, instead of trying to cram facts into Volunteers' heads during stateside classroom sessions.

The Task Force has recommended that even more of the training take place outside the college campus, in radically unfamiliar environments slums or rural areas or Job Corps camps, or in other cultures such as Puerto Rico, or in the foreign countries themselves.

Many ingredients of these programs have already been successfully demonstrated:

* at the Peace Corps' own training centers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands;

* in an experimental program at St. John's College in Annapolis where the seminar was the main form of instruction and field experience was provided for weeks on kibbutzim in Israel;

* in a program at the University of Wisconsin largely designed to run by former Volunteers of India.

The Peace Corps' s new Advanced Training program is a special area for innovation. (See story at left.)

Another idea promoted by the Task Force is that of accreditation of Peace Corps service as part of university education.

Five-year B. A. programs, which include two years of Peace Corps service, have been instituted at the University of Western Michigan and Franconia (N. H.) Credit towards a master's degree education is being given by Michigan State University to Volunteers who teach in Nigeria, and the University of Missouri will give credit towards a master's degree om community development for Volunteers in Peru.