The Ambassadors

After her first weeks at Pennsylvania's Edwardsville High School, the visiting teacher from England was almost ready to pack up and go home. Her American pupils, she reported, "greet me with anything from 'The top of the morning to you' to 'Tallyho,' and occasionally when they are changing classes, a head pokes through the doorway and calls, 'Hi ya, ma'am, what's the scoop?' or something equally imbecilic."

But as the months passed, the Londoner began to realize that what she first took for sheer insolence was often apt to grow out of a "friendly informality of manner." By the time her year in Edwardsville (pop. 6,686) was up, she and her charges had won each other over completely.

Fabulous Country. In the ten years since the State Department and the Office of Education started their exchange-teachers' program, hundreds of foreigners like London's Catherine O'Connell have come to the U.S., while more than 2,000 Americans have taught abroad. Last week the Queen Elizabeth landed 100 more Britons, who were duly greeted in Manhattan by Cornelius McLaughlin, head of the teacher-exchange section at the Office of Education. By the time the summer is over, the total number of exchange teachers sent to the U.S. will have reached 1,543. Of the many U.S. good-will efforts, the program may be minor. But it has also been one of the best.

As might be expected, some foreigners are utterly bewildered by the informality of U.S. schools, and a few Americans grow restive in the strict foreign classroom. But in general, the exchange teachers make the most of their year.

In Japan U.S. teachers have become so popular that some schools have had to put a ceiling on the number of students they can have. In Thailand an American found that English was being taught strictly by rote, introduced songs and games that, as her Thai colleagues admitted, got amazing results.

In McLean, Va. a British teacher evolved a whole new science program for the Potomac School, which is now a regular part of the curriculum. The principal of Delaware's Bridgeville Consolidated School reported that his visiting Scot was "so delightful" that even his kilt was accepted "without gibes from the males and with downright enthusiasm by the females." In Gig Harbor, Wash, a high-school student won an award in the Betty Crocker "American Homemaker of Tomorrow" contest, took her British home-economics teacher along on the winning trip to Washington, D.C., Williamsburg and Philadelphia. "It was," said the Briton later, "one of those things that could only have happened in this fabulous country."

The Real America. All in all, the exchangees have proved effective ambassadors. For many it is a year of personal triumph. Among these is Headmaster Henry Callard of Baltimore's Gilman School, who taught a year at King's School in Bruton, England. When he and his family left England, his pupils sent him a stool used at Queen Elizabeth's coronation in Westminster Abbey, solemnly recorded in their magazine: "Whenever in the future any of us feels irritation at the utterances of some American politicians, we shall remember the Callards, and our ruffled feelings will be soothed by the reflection that it is people like them who are the real America."

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