Protestant missionaries in Latin America. Colonial "civilizers"
in the Pacific. Peace Corps Volunteers in Africa. Since the 1890s,
thousands of American teachers--mostly young, white, middle-class,
and inexperienced--have fanned out across the globe. "Innocents
Abroad" tells the story of what they intended to teach and what
lessons they learned.
Drawing on extensive archives of the teachers' letters and
diaries, as well as more recent accounts, Jonathan Zimmerman argues
that until the early twentieth century, the teachers assumed their
own superiority; they sought to bring civilization, Protestantism,
and soap to their host countries. But by the mid-twentieth century,
as teachers borrowed the concept of "culture" from influential
anthropologists, they became far more self-questioning about their
ethical and social assumptions, their educational theories, and the
complexity of their role in a foreign society.
Filled with anecdotes and dilemmas--often funny, always
vivid--Zimmerman's narrative explores the teachers' shifting
attitudes about their country and themselves, in a world that was
more unexpected and unsettling than they could have imagined.
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