Agents of Change: A Close Look at the Peace Corps
By David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett. Little, Brown & Co. 244 pp. $5.95.

Since the beginning, most writers about the Peace Corps have either derided it or heaped praise on it, but never understood it. In this book, David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett, two former officials of the organization, never mock or gush about it but always understand it. Their work is tough, realistic criticism, so tough and real that it is sometimes cruel and occasionally unfair. But it tells us, as no other book has, what the Peace Corps is all about.

In assessing the work of the 30,000 volunteers sent to the Third World since 1961, Hapgood and Bennett conclude that “as a contributor to development in the Third World, the Peace Corps can make no great claims to accomplishment. . . . Volunteers have filled a lot of jobs, but their utility on those jobs, and often the utility of the jobs themselves, is questionable.”

The writers do see more hope for the future. “An enormous potential clearly exists in the Peace Corps. ...” they write. “If the Peace Corps can build on the isolated cases of its success that its volunteers have registered, then its help to the Third World could be much greater than it has been to date.”

But, even if the potential for development is unrealized, Hapgood and Bennett see a great deal of worth in the project. “Though they have not yet contributed much to development . . .” the writers go on, “the volunteers have justified John F. Kennedy’s idea many times over by what they have learned. What they do with that learning in later years will be the measure of what the American people are getting for their money. In our opinion, we Americans are likely to draw high dividends from our investment in the Peace Corps. Americans are getting a very special education at a bargain price: This is the clearest result of the Peace Corps experiment. ... Returning volunteers have helped to take a lot of the mystery and fear out of the American view of the Third World.”

Although it may not sound that way, their assessment is gloomy and their praise rather faint. The surest way to destroy the outfit would be to encourage volunteers and officials to look on themselves as part of a great educational experiment instead of a serious attempt to deal with the development problems of the Third World. If the Peace Corps really is no more than “a very special education at a bargain price,” it ought to pack up. Despite what they say, the conclusions of Hapgood and Bennett make the venture seem like a failure.

In reaching their conclusions, Hapgood and Bennett set down the most debilitating problem of the Third World, the syndrome of poverty that makes its victims feel dependent, suspicious, hostile, and inadequate:

“The victim of the syndrome often sees his survival as beyond his control. . . . He is suspicious of the people he has grown up with, unwilling to extend them confidence enough to cooperate in mutually beneficial projects. . . . He meets the outside world with hostility, and frequently the familiar world as well. . . . Hope is a luxury he cannot afford.”

Moreover, they go on, “change is a threat. The citizen of the underdeveloped world tends to be inflexible, to resist that which is new.”

Development comes when these poor overcome their resistance, inflexibility and fear, and accept some change. A volunteer can contribute to this development if he serves as an “agent of change” and helps the fearful poor build enough self-confidence to overcome the inner barriers. A good “agent of change” recognizes that he must deal in small, timid steps, for even the smallest and most timid change seems awesome to those afflicted with fear.

The book acknowledges that some volunteers show “apparent effectiveness” as agents of change. The best volunteers are those who understand the local culture, use and adapt local techniques to improve production, keep their own powers limited and unobtrusive, and help open new channels of communication among the poor. But Hapgood and Bennett believe very few volunteers have so far had the sensitivity and guidance to do this job well.

Volunteers and planners in Washington have failed, according to the authors, because they have often attempted to impose American attitudes and techniques on the people they were trying to help. This faith in the innate goodness of American ideas reaches deeply into the Peace Corps. The writers describe Corps officials in Washington who sometimes assigned volunteers overseas without too much concern over what they would be doing, confident that any contact with volunteers would have to be valuable to people of the Third World. “If you peel this assumption to its core,” Hapgood and Bennett say, “you find a colossally ethnocentric attitude: That we Americans are so good (or skilled, or democratic, or whatever) that our very presence among the less fortunate is a benefit in itself.”

The book rightly describes the work of the Peace Corps as cultural imperialism, as intervention in the affairs of others. “Do Americans have any right to thrust themselves into distant societies so different from their own?” Hapgood and Bennett ask. They never answer the question, except to note that American intervention is probably inevitable. But it is clear from the tone of the book that they do not like the idea much and are troubled by it.

In fact, Hapgood and Bennett seem hung up on this issue. They sometimes assess the value of a change on how American or un-American it is. Since the idea of change itself or development or modernization can be construed as somehow American, or at least Western, a reader sometimes gets the feeling that the authors might be uncomfortable with any change at all that is provoked from the outside. That, of course, is a false impression, but Hapgood and Bennett do seem to carry their argument to an unfair extreme in their discussion of Peace Corps work in education.

There is sharp criticism of the organization for its mad rush into teaching at the beginning. “Teaching was... the easiest job for the Peace Corps to take on,” and it blindly filled almost any request by a Third World government for teachers. But the schools of the Third World are often less concerned with development than with the perpetuation of an elite class. The writers call these schools “the stronghold of the elite... a class of overprivileged rulers, more concerned with cars and other material goodies than with progress, holding the masses in profound contempt.” By supporting such schools, the Peace Corps “has laid itself open to the charge that it is implicitly encouraging the ruling elite to spend lavishly on an irrelevant school system while starving the nation’s other needs.”

Hapgood and Bennett are justified in making so sharp an attack on this rush to teaching. But they are just as sharp in condemning the Peace Corps’s attempts to reform its teaching programs. In the last few years, some officials have insisted that volunteer teachers are useless unless they make an attempt to reform the elitist, unthinking, rote-learning educational systems of the Third World. But the book dismisses this as another form of cultural imperialism, insisting that a volunteer teacher who helped his students to learn problem solving, democracy and creativity would be helping them learn American values. Recalling that French colonial teachers once required their African students to read from a book that began, “Our Ancestors, the Gauls, were tall men with fair hair and blue eyes,” Hapgood and Bennett say, “it does not take too great a leap of the imagination to visualize ... the school children of the Third World reciting to their approving volunteer teacher; ‘Our ancestors, the Founding Fathers, were democrats and innovators....’”

This strikes me as a rather churlish and offhand way to dismiss the work and potential of almost half the volunteers in the Peace Corps. Since most Third World school systems are irrelevant, and since most will continue to exist anyway, it does not shock me when Peace Corps volunteers infuse them with a few American values to try to make them more relevant to the Third World. Perhaps I am just a little less squeamish than Hapgood and Bennett about cultural imperialism. But, though I see more hope for reform in the teaching programs, I would agree that the Peace Corps has spent too much of its energy on education and not enough on activities like rural development that are more relevant to the modernization of the Third World.

In a sense, the publication of this book itself is a tribute to the organization. Both Hapgood and Bennett were members of the Peace Corps Evaluation Division, a staff of writers, journalists and lawyers whose job was to travel abroad and analyze the work of the Peace Corps. Under the leadership of Charles Peters, a former West Virginia legislator who is now publishing the Washington Monthly, the evaluators were tough critics who forced the Corps into painful self-analysis and helped it profit from its foolish blunders. For years the Peace Corps had been hearing the same kind of tough talk from Hapgood and Bennett that they are now dishing out to the public. This kind of self-criticism is rare anywhere and probably unique in the United States Government.

All in all, I found the conclusions of the book too harsh. I think the volunteer group is more successful than it admits, at least compared to the massive blunderings of other American organizations on the murky, ironic and heartless paths to development. But Hapgood and Bennett set the terms for any intelligent discussion of the matter. They know the problems of Third World development. They know the terror of change in the frail bodies and souls of the poor. They know the cultural snags that entwine the volunteer. They know the limitations and potential of young and innocent Americans. Tough and harsh, they help us see the real Peace Corps.

Mr. Meisler, Africa correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was formerly deputy director of the Office of Evaluation and Research in the Peace Corps.