IN ADDITION TO ITS PROMOTIONAL LITERATURE, Crossroads and its successors, The United States Experiment gradually produced four educational booklets designed respectively for the outbound leader, the outbound Experimenter, the town representative and the host family.

The Leader's Handbook was started in 1934 and as a looseleaf notebook was revised annually. It finally grew into a substantial volume.

The Experimenter's Handbook (Gordon Boyce changed the name to Passport to Understanding) had its source in the suggestions as to how to gain most from the summer, which were sent to every Experimenter beginning in 1932 as bulletins. In 1938 it appeared as a home-made pamphlet. It was produced by poor mimeographing and stapled together in a heavy yellow wrapping paper cover. Manufactured in the dining room of the Watt family in Syracuse, it was an example of the economical methods used in the early days of the organization. However, it shows what the earliest Experimenters were thinking about. Because it is concentrated material which does not make easy reading, extended quotations from this first Handbook have been relegated to Appendix B, page 326.

Because the United States Experiment for many years had little or no in-coming activity, the publication for the receiving families appeared as a mimeographed pamphlet called Hints to Hosts in 1942. The publication for the local representatives did not appear until the volume of Experimenters coming into the United States began to grow in 1952.

The factors that made The Experiment the success which it is have been described and explained in Chapter 11, "The Experiment Comes into Being." But simply writing a systematic plan for creating international understanding, no matter how wise it might be, was only a first step. Planting the system in the minds of thousands of outbound and home-giving Experimenters was a work that called for constant effort through the years in more than forty countries scattered around the world. Some of the factors like selection, training, leadership, foreign language learning, the homestay, although always changing because of improvement, are relatively easy to grasp at a level where they can be effectively applied. Other factors while simple enough when understood, have been found to be so difficult to grasp that Experimenters have insisted: "Nobody really understands The Experiment until he has experienced it."

There are three of these difficult factors which together constitute a very large part of what we know as orientation. They are: attitude training, international understanding and discussion method. It is interesting to note that The Experiment gives its own particular meanings to them which are different from the meanings used by the general public, although gradually the public is beginning to appreciate The Experiment's viewpoint. However, even after thirty-three years of careful thinking by hundreds of Experiment groups from many countries, the international Experiment has not achieved complete working agreement on exactly what the three terms mean.

For example, as I write this on December 18, 1965, 1 have just received a letter from Mevrouw Fiedeldij Dop who, with her husband, directs the Dutch Experiment. In it she discusses the all-important question of attitude training versus the learning of facts as the basis of effective orientation. She and her husband have been the leaders in Europe of Experiment educational theory. She wrote:

Tonight I have been reading a Dutch leader's report on European groups to India in which she said: "Orientation is a good thing, but it cannot change what needs to be changed in the characters of the members and the leader. I think that a great insistence on the simplicity of the behavior could be more useful than a lot of advises (information) about the new country."

The foregoing was an exact excerpt from Mevrouw Dop's letter . She goes on to explain what the leader meant by "insistence on the simplicity of behavior":

attitude, while information has to do with facts. Most people being as they are, don't think it is necessary for their attitude to be oriented, let alone changed.

It will be interesting to trace the struggle of The Experiment to try to make use of attitude development as the major feature of orientation for living abroad (or if not too distracting a thought, simply for any living).

It has already been stated that two of the objectives of The First Experiment in 1932 were for each member: 1) to learn how French and German boys live and think by living and thinking with them, and 2) to make friends among them by being a friend to them. In other words, the chief preoccupation of the first year was not facts ---geographical or historical---but developing an understanding attitude toward the European boys.

In the early years of The Experiment, with my help, the leaders succeeded fairly well in emphasizing attitude development in their orientation discussions. This memory is probably accurate because I was very much disappointed when one very well qualified leader, a student of politics, lectured to his group on foreign policy instead of discussing with them how to acquire attitudes which would have been helpful in adjusting to their European homes.

From 1932-45 our groups traveled third class on passenger liners of British, French and German companies. There were no other groups on board interested in orientation at that time, hence no one interfered with discussions on attitude development by Experiment leaders. When the passenger liners refused to accept student groups, it became necessary to charter ships. With the creation of the Council on Student Travel in 1945, it not only provided cheap transportation for students but also supplied a day-long program of orientation. Following customary college procedures, the Council organized a series of lectures not only about European countries but particularly about international relations in general and United States Foreign Policy in particular. The Experiment's narrowly specialized orientation for living was seriously damaged. Experimenters and especially leaders began to think that lectures providing facts and not attitude training were essential in orientation. I can remember being particularly infuriated when the time of our own students was wasted by lectures on "Life and Culture in the United States," when we should have been developing attitudes to help us adjust to our foreign families. The confusion created in Experiment orientation has not yet been clarified as Mevrouw Dop's letter shows.

She points out that orientation in Experiment circles should deal with the development of attitudes. No doubt the fact that attitudes are such elusive things, so hard to measure, explains why people in general have not been able to grasp their importance in determining human behavior in international human relations. Pointing to the fact that one of the leaders of the Dutch Experiment had grasped the idea, she was undoubtedly implying that there were many people involved in The Experiment whose minds-set because of a lifetime of habit---could think of learning only in terms of acquiring facts.

It is impossible to say to what extent people involved in developing international attitudes outside of The Experiment have been able to accept and use the idea of attitude training. One thing seems certain, however, that a considerable portion of those who have participated in The Experiment have been exposed to the idea of developing suitable attitudes and have lived for two months with a group of people who were discussing their effectiveness, nevertheless, because of iron-clad habit, when they think of preparation for living abroad, can think only in terms of learning facts about countries.

The term "international understanding" has had a history of confusion which almost parallels that of the term "the development of attitudes" because the same factors are involved. Hours of fruitless discussions over a period of years was the result. Gradually about the year 1946 the term "international understanding" came into use by the educational travel organizations. It became the mark of respectability for educational travel projects. The expression had a prominent place in advertising announcements. Not only did groups organized by universities claim that their twenty-one day tour of rapid sightseeing travel produced it, but well-meaning and not well-informed foundations provided scholarships to aid bright students to participate. Travel bureaus used the expression as bait. The study-abroad projects, the Youth Hostel Tours and organizations which conducted work camps were quite sure that their programs produced it also. Howard Wilson, Professor of International Relations and an executive of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, gave scholarships to graduate students for a summer of study abroad at prestigious institutions in the pursuit of what he thought international understanding was and what we were sure was not.

The Experiment, in putting its members into homes for a month and traveling with the same people for another month, thought they really knew how to produce it and doubted very much whether a sight-seeing trip, a European summer of study for Americans, Youth Hostels or work camps actually produced the kind of international understanding which we had in mind. It did not seem reasonable that such widely varying exercises could have a similar result.

Discussions of the subject were carried on seriously in student meetings and their journals. None of us seemed to be aware that the sponsors of different methods were talking about two very different things when they used this expression. For the students of international politics the term meant a knowledge of foreign policy in general and that of the United States in particular. Against this generally accepted use of the term, it was hard for The Experiment to gain acceptance for a very different use of it.

Eventually The Experiment ceased to be concerned with the meaning of international understanding as other organizations used it but frustrating talks went on between different persons within the organization. When the debaters thought they were discussing the same thing but actually had two different things in mind, they wasted hours in fruitless conversation. Finally almost everyone in The Experiment agreed that international understanding was the ability to get on well with the people of another country while living in their homes.

About 1952, starting with secondary schools, the use of the "homestay" as a means of developing good relations between individuals of different cultures, spread to the universities. Now the mark of respectability in educational travel became the homestay. Beginning with the program of the American Field Service, secondary school students were brought to the United States from many foreign countries to live in homes and go to high schools for about a year. The organization is now well known for its large and effective program.

At the date of this writing, 1966, the uncounted travel groups which have a homestay, or are promised it, must number in the hundreds. It required thirty years from the birth of The Experiment before homestays became commonly accepted and used by the public.

The third concept which has been difficult for practicing Experimenters to understand thoroughly was discussion method. Coming into existence about the same time as The Experiment, its application spread rapidly to a wide variety of activities. Starting with The Inquiry's idea of solving problems by a meeting of minds, the study of relationships within a group rapidly became a major interest of the social psychologists and was responsible for the current emphasis on communication. Under the name of group-work it was applied to such varied situations as teaching problem children to take their place in society by living in groups, to stimulating interest in learning music by group instead of individual instruction.

In Chapter 11 the origin of discussion method and its profound influence on The Experiment has been described. A thorough knowledge of discussion theory and practice is essential for anyone having responsibility for Experiment groups. The skillful discussion leader will use the force of opinion within his group to create and develop enthusiasms and to help a group to unify and direct itself; above all, to develop readiness to solve the problems of adjustment to living conditions which are strange and new. It cannot be mentioned too often that through group discussion, the Experimenter learns to look at himself in relation to his new environment. He develops attitudes of open-mindedness (expect the unexpected), willingness to postpone judgments.

In addition to building esprit de corps, both the Experimenter's and the Leader's Handbooks accumulated facts throughout the years about a myriad of administrative details. The four handbooks help to lubricate into a smoothly running experience what might well be a painful one. They are important tools.

Excerpts from the first Experimenter's Handbook are found in Appendix B, page 326.

NEXT TO THE QUESTION OF "HOW DID YOU GET THE IDEA for The Experiment?" the most frequent one has been, "How did you go about finding representatives in the different countries?" Jack Wallace, one of my many advisors in writing this book, phrased the question: "How did you work out the rationale for what has been so important for The Experiment---having it represented entirely by nationals of the co-operating countries?"

As in the case of many other questions about this book, I began to think about them only when it was time to write. Jack's question implied that I had given careful thought to the fact that The Experiment should be represented in every country by nationals rather than by Americans as some international organizations based in the United States were represented. As soon as I thought about it I realized that it was because I knew Europe and the Europeans sufficiently well so that Americans never came under consideration. As the chapter synopses in Book I point out, my numerous trips to Europe made me well acquainted with that continent. The process was as follows: Beginning with my first trip in 1914, while still in college, I was lucky enough to have stayed in one place, never rushing about sightseeing. At the end of that trip, when the First World War broke out, I was living in a home in England. My summer of studying German in 1926, with its homestay and its month of mountain walking, appealed to me tremendously.

The final step in getting ready for The Experiment was taking a group of students walking through Brittany and climbing a peak in Switzerland in 1930. In 1931, when I planned The Experiment, my primary object was to bring American and European young people together, and to do this under conditions that were as different as possible from the American tourist trip. The nearest I came to getting an American intermediary was to employ a tourist office to buy steamship and railway tickets. But when they tried to push me in the direction of tourist itineraries, I dropped them and since then our European national directors have taken over the services they had rendered.

By that time I knew both German and French quite well and found it easy to deal directly with Europeans. I met Captain Bach and during The First Experiment made contacts with Europeans through whom I gradually found people who have faithfully served ever since. It is probably true that The Experiment was the rare travel group at that time which dealt directly with Europeans. This circumstance had a strong influence on our thinking. The policy grew out of these conditions and was not consciously thought out.

In September 1932, when Captain Bach and I decided that we could not work together, I needed representatives in both France and Germany. Jean Vergnes was prepared to help me in France; Herr Anton Fendrich, of Freiburg, Germany, had already shown his interest by inviting the first group to meet his friends, when we left La Borcarderie. The old gentleman was most attractive---his poetlike white hair was combed back like a drift. He had been Germany's famous newspaper columnist during the First World War. He had much to say to our boys and expressed it beautifully, but only in German. Ed Hogenauer, whose German was good, translated for him. The picture is clear to me still: Herr Fendrich spoke enthusiastically for a time, and Ed translated it in a quarter of the time. Surprised and injured, Fendrich looked at Ed, wondering what had happened to his jewels. But before we left, he had invited a group of ten young Americans to return to Freiburg the following year. As he was getting on in years, he found others to arrange for several more years of delightful sojourns in that university city with its ancient city gates, its historic Münster, its mountains, and its vineyards.

To find a representative for the second German group, I went to Berlin to the Pädagogische Auslandsstelle (school travel bureau) and was sent to the small town of Fürstenwalde, where the school was eager for contacts abroad.

As far as France was concerned, I came to know Jean Vergnes well during the summer at Valangin together. I remember how hard it was for me to understand his French, and it probably took two months before I finally succeeded in pronouncing his name correctly. But he was a skilled mountaineer, and that attracted me to him.

When I arrived in Paris late in September following The First Experiment, looking for someone to represent us, he was deeply involved in establishing a student hostel for the Chevaliers de la Paix in the university section of Paris. Strangely enough, no Experiment group to France materialized the second year, but in September of that year we made plans for The Third Experiment. As M. Vergnes knew many French Protestant pastors, he had little difficulty in locating Pastor Angevin in the city of Bourg in eastern France. Angevin did the impossible, finding twenty-three homes, rather than eleven, for all the American young people of The Third Experiment. Vergnes continued in the future to fill our rapidly increasing needs for French "hometowns," and by so, doing, he became The Experiment's first national director. This indicated to me that we would need national directors in all countries.

Following The Second Experiment, I traveled about Europe looking for them, and found Alfons Schunter, a German secondary school teacher of English. He became the second national director, and Frau Dr. Sanchez of Austria, the third.

England was the fourth country to join, and here we worked directly through local representatives. A. Buel Trowbridge, a Rhodes Scholar who had been teaching at Andover Academy, made arrangements personally for several years. It was not until the Seventh Experiment that the British League of Nations Association agreed to be our representative, serving in the capacity of national director.

I did not lead any groups after The First Experiment, but spent summers visiting all of them. When they returned home, I stayed on. As rapidly as I could recruit the necessary groups, I sought national directors in France, Germany, Austria, England, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland; and when war came, Mexico, Japan, Peru, Canada, Brazil, Colombia and Guatemala.

In those days, being a national director was quite different from what it is now, as there were no other organizations interested in finding homes for young people from other countries. For years, if not centuries, there had been private exchanges. There was actually a system in use called au pair which consisted of a visit by a girl or boy of another country, sometimes to be a "mother's helper," sometimes to teach a language or to learn one.

One of my greatest satisfactions in The Experiment was to be able to retain as national directors and friends those who continued to work, year after year generally with little or no compensation, at the difficult task of finding families or of finding a local representative who would find them.

Thus it became the custom for every country to be represented by a national rather than by someone from the United States. And when the constitution was written each of the national offices was recognized as equal to and independent of any other. Although from the very earliest days, the funds for conducting the programs came entirely from The United States Experiment, those receiving the groups also made a major contribution in donating their work, so that there was a feeling of partnership and, what was just as important, a feeling of personal friendship. We were on a basis of equality. I believe The Experiment organizations of all countries felt the equality from the first. When the Annual International Meeting was started in 1949 there was no written contract and no legal relationship. It was understood that the only thing which held The Experiment together was an interest in working for the objective in which everyone believed. I can remember that I did not feel entirely happy when these relationships were put on paper. It is true that The Experiment could not legally be incorporated as an international body, so there never was, nor is there today, any legal compulsion on the national organizations which are its members. When we put into writing the rules by which The Experiment should operate, I had the feeling that some individuals might depend more on the written word than on the original, simple feeling of friendly cooperation which is the only force that holds us together.

As the different revisions of the constitution were periodically worked out and adopted, particularly when the requirements for membership were specified, this seemed to me to increase our dependence on the words of a document and to decrease our enthusiasm for working together. I felt that making the members appear to be bound by law, when in reality we were not, might tend to confuse some into thinking that The Experiment is not entirely a thing of the spirit.

It is true that the United States office of The Experiment has become financially so strong and, as a working group, so competent that the many American friends of the organization who have little contact with the other national organizations are misled into assuming that the controlling body of the International Experiment is the United States Experiment, rather than the International Council. We had to continually point out to United States Experiment members that in the Council the United States Experiment has only one vote, just like any other country.

Sitting on a crowded deck in tourist class in June, 1949, 1 remember being struck by the necessity for all the national directors, of whom there were then twelve, to get acquainted with one another. There had been no occasion for them to get acquainted, for there were no exchanges between the European countries. The program was confined to the United States sending groups to Europe. Until the Annual International Meeting was formed, I was the only connecting link.

So I decided to bring the directors together the following September. The First Annual Meeting was confined largely to those national directors who were easily accessible to Paris. The meeting, planned for one day only, took place in the office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mast of those who attended spoke French, so the discussions were in that language, although this never happened again. The conclusions reached were as follows:

A one-day conference in a busy city is not adequate and in the future it must last for a week and be held in some simple village.

Apart from the question of members getting acquainted, the business of the Second Meeting should be to find the best way of conducting The Experiment, although there is much in the current plan which is right and effective. The preoccupation of the Second Meeting should be with "trouble-shooting." Each country should make a report on the success of the group they sent, and that report should be subject to the inevitable frank discussion of what had gone wrong and how it could be improved.

It is interesting to note that everyone present felt the urge to improve. It must also be remembered that at that time, discussion method was unknown in Europe. But it was gradually being introduced by the American groups. There was, however, one problem which was not solved. An English-speaking German boy registered his dissatisfaction. He had come from München to participate, but, as he pointed out, not knowing French, he might just as well have stayed home. Communication in an international organization often seems an insoluble problem. It is the source of frustration and confused thinking. The fact that English now seems to have become almost universal in The Experiment has gone a long may in solving the problem.

Fortunately, The Meeting has found a highly satisfactory way of handling members who do not speak English. The use of our traditional small discussion groups makes it possible for those who do not know a second language to think and discuss in their own. For example, participants speaking only Spanish form a discussion group using that language, but they are joined by the people of other nationalities present who can converse in Spanish. The drudgery of translation is eliminated, and no one is placed at the disadvantage of trying to speak in a half-understood language.

For the second gathering, the lovely town of Ueberlingen on the Bodensee, in southwestern Germany, was chosen because it was central for all countries. Margaret Kruger, whose son, Klaus, had been a member of the first German group to the United States, invited Leslie and me to stay with her in her comfortable little home on the shore of the lake. Together we set out to get acquainted with the town and the neighborhood, which has the most salubrious climate in Germany. We sampled all of the Gasthöfe (the village inns), and chose Gasthof zur Traube, with its golden bunch of grapes hanging over the front door, for this is a wine-producing region. It was considered important to purchase a good supply of the delicious wine well in advance of the meeting, so that one of my tasks was to taste a rather large variety of them. Later, our labors were much appreciated by those who attended.

Compared with the luxurious hotels in which it is felt necessary to hold meetings now, the accommodations were simple, but satisfying to everyone present. With the scarcity of food which had followed the war for years, the ample meals were much appreciated. The cost per member, except traveling, was two dollars and twenty cents per day.

Although there were thirty-two of us involved, The Second Meeting did not experience difficulty in realizing its ambition to get acquainted. Since we were together all day for a week, and since those who did not speak English easily were the exception, there was a rare good spirit in the meeting.

Ueberlingen had the great advantage of being a "first." The pleasure of meeting for the first time kindred souls with the same interests, learning to know them and their ideals, produced a stimulating atmosphere.

Reporting on the success or failure of the groups which had returned to their home countries only a few days before filled most of our time. The long daily discussions were held on the lake shore in the beautiful Kurpark. Here we could look across the lake to the snow-capped Alps of Switzerland.

As each year The Meeting grew larger, I tried to provide a situation in which everyone would learn to know all the others. We planned all sorts of devices for trying to retain the great advantage of the small Experiment group. My speech of welcome always reminded those present to "turn their backs on their former friends and seek new acquaintances." I was always disappointed that, with normal shyness, it took too long for some people to break the ice.

At The Fifth Meeting, in Ceres, in the Italian Alps, in the year 1953, the total group of eighty-one people was divided into three "families." Each family lived in a separate hotel until they were acquainted, and then they were reshuffled in order that each member saw every other constantly for several days. Year after year, the numbers grew larger, and there were different devices to produce the largest possible amount of personal acquaintance. The time came, however, when it was impossible to know everyone in six days, and it became necessary to arrange The Meeting so that everyone would try to get acquainted with a limited number, but not with the whole group of two hundred and fifty. There were, of course, complaints on the part of those who preferred to try to know everyone.

Since The Experiment's method of operating was to send groups of one country to spend the whole of the summer in another, all arrangements as well as financial dealings were between the representatives of two countries only. At that time, the pairs cooperating consisted entirely of one European country and the United States, since the exchanges between European countries were slow in getting started. Coming to an agreement through face-to-face conversations was fast and accurate as compared with the inevitable confusion arising from correspondence, particularly when letters are exchanged between people of two different cultures. These binational talks proved to be one of the principal advantages of the yearly Meeting.

Another important advantage was the opportunity for the Europeans who had not experienced discussion method to learn how to use it. Accustomed as they were to the formalities of parliamentary procedure, almost everyone was disturbed at first when the conclusions to our talks were formulated from the "sense of the meeting" instead of by voting on a resolution. Until they began to grasp the fact that the method provided a better way of thinking together, some were quite sure that nothing was being accomplished. Others were sure that they belonged to a culture for whom it was not natural to discuss by exchanging ideas. Their resistance to discussion was so great at first that they tried to convince people that this inability to discuss amounted to a genuine national difference. Only gradually did the advantage of discussion become clear, and it finally was written into the Constitution as The Experiment's official method. Even yet there is a tendency to restrict the free exchange of ideas by various formalities. For example, the insistence upon an agenda determined in advance of the Meeting has a tendency to eliminate the original solutions which discussion method is capable of producing. For many years the Council consisted entirely of people who were capable of thinking together cooperatively. Unfortunately there is now a small minority of legalistically minded members who are unable to do this.

According to the decision taken in Paris, meetings took place each September, and were always held in a different country, in a village with simple accommodations. To a very large extent, the people who met annually were the same, and the happy personal relations and the good spirit of Ueberlingen continued. For example, as late as the Sixteenth Meeting, held in Athens, Gordon Boyce, Walter Gaupp, Mevrouw Fiedeldij Dop, Jean Vergnes, and I were all present, as we had been at Ueberlingen and every meeting since then. Many of those who joined The Experiment later have been equally constant attendants.

Through the years, each of the meetings has achieved a character of its own, which depended largely on the country in which it was held. It is sad not to be able to describe each of them. There was a steady growth in the numbers that attended, as well as the time spent. The only exception was The Fifth Meeting in the town of Heiden, in eastern Switzerland, when the attendance was limited to the National Directors and a few "experts" who were sufficiently acquainted with the organization to help in writing the working constitution.

The Meeting was created largely to be a forum for national directors, but as it increased in size its character was forced to change. The first large step in its development was in 1952 when Jean Vergnes decided it would be excellent instruction as well as desirable compensation for his local representatives to attend. They were all invited, expenses paid by the French Experiment. With this increase to thirty Frenchmen, compared to eleven of the previous year, and with the representatives from newly added countries, the original single discussion group had become unwieldy. The International Council consisting of one "voice" from each member country met for the first time in Holland in 1955 and became the highest legislative body of The International Experiment. Gradually other organizations were added.

The Interim Committee was started in response to a need to make decisions between the yearly Council meetings so that projects would not be delayed. To facilitate their meetings, members were appointed from European countries located near to one another. As the importance of this committee increased, the Secretary General made a trip to Europe to represent the United States.

The fourth international organization was the Administrative Conference. Started as a small group of specialists in technical travel, it did the work which a travel bureau does. Under the effective leadership of Fredi Salzmann, Director of the Swiss office, it grew rapidly into a large organization and took over many questions outside of the technical travel area.

Then it developed that certain decisions needed to be made within a matter of days and Vice-President Walter Gaupp was authorized to consult with two members of the Interim Committee by telephone, and so the fifth organization, the Urgency Committee, was created. (The name is probably Dutch-English.)

In addition to growing in numbers, the length of The Meeting also increased gradually from one to three weeks. This additional time was spent in travel and later in homestays. Beginning in 1957 when a plane was chartered to bring Europeans to the Putney meeting, time was provided for sightseeing in the United States both before and after The Meeting.

The various host countries felt at liberty to arrange the order of events as seemed most suitable to the conditions in their country.

Some of the national directors were disturbed because their countries did not share the expense of administering the international organization borne by the United States, and after a few years of discussion, the International Fund was established at the Malvern meeting of the Council. Into this fund, every country pays two dollars for each Experimenter that it sends abroad. This was an important change, for until that time, the Council did not have any funds at its disposal and was in the position only to legislate on educational policy. The resources of the International Fund are used to pay the expenses of individuals of new or distant countries so that they may attend the General International Meetings, or for other educational purposes.

Finally the opportunity was provided to people of new and distant countries to attend a Training Course which was held just before The Meeting. The first took place in Greece in 1964.

Thus beginning with thirty-two people in Ueberlingen in 1950, the international organization has grown until it now has seven different organizations to meet the needs of The International Experiment.

Following the Putney Meeting in 1957, it became so popular that the numbers had to be limited in order to make its work effective. Now the number is limited to from two hundred and twenty-five to two hundred and fifty. People gather from all of the continents and usually there is a chartered plane provided for crossing the North Atlantic. In addition to Directors and their respective staffs, those who attend are largely older people, members of host families who seize an inexpensive opportunity to learn about The Experiment and to meet the workers from far-distant countries.

* Beginning with the seventh meeting, the Council met separately. The name of the place of the Council meeting is underneath the GIM location.
**The growth in numbers showed a sudden increase of three hundred per cent in 1957 when, through the use of chartered planes, many Europeans visited the United States.
***Moved at the last minute from New Delhi.

AT THE ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL MEETING (AS IT WAS then called) at Ceres, Italy, in 1953, it was decided to write a constitution for The Experiment the next year. To facilitate the work it was agreed that the meeting would be smaller than usual and that only people who had extended experience with the organization's activities would be expected. In general they were national directors. Although it was not done with the constitution in mind an Experiment seminar was arranged in Northampton, Massachusetts, in January, 1952, with the purpose of organizing The Experiment thinking that had been done up to that, date.

Miriam Usher Chrisman was the daughter of an academic home. Her father, a professor at Harvard, had raised two daughters in a university atmosphere. Scholarship was as much a part of their daily life as the food they ate. By the year 1952, Miriam was living with her physician husband, Donald Chrisman, in the city of Northampton, Massachusetts, pursuing her graduate studies. Already a one-time Experimenter and a one-time group leader, she was a most knowledgeable person on the theory of Experiment Method.

Bud Smith, from my home town, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was our other expert. He was a psychologist, in the process of finishing a study of the changes of attitude which an Experiment summer brings about. While working for his doctorate at Harvard University, he was teaching social psychology at Bennington College.

At my request, Miriam had invited Bud and me and several others to spend the better part of a day studying and formulating as many as possible of the principles on which The Experiment operated. My part of the seminar had been to glean these from Crossroads, from the Experimenter's and Leader's Handbooks, and from the office routine. Out of this mass of unorganized material I contrived what I called the basic assumptions of Experiment Method.

A first concern of the seminar members was whether we were justified in calling the assumptions principles. During the twenty years of The Experiment's existence (1932 to 1951), about 2,500 young Americans had gone abroad to live with an equal number of families in approximately twenty-four different countries. The Experiment sayings which were produced during the course of these years had been evolved as a result of an annual cycle of planning, tryout, appraisal, and finally, replanning. Each Experimenter was expected to criticize his experience. No measurements had been made of this group but through the continuing discussions of the same subjects year after year a general consensus was arrived at. Since the results of the discussion based on common sense observation were quite similar regardless of time or place, the members of the seminar felt that the findings could not be considered scientific principles. But as statements in the realm of social psychology their reliability as practical guides for our organization was reasonably high.

The product of the seminar was as follows and it may be of interest to compare them with the principles of the constitution which are found in Appendix C.

1. GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS

A. People learn to live together by living together.

B. The home is the greatest educational institution in the world.

C. Experience is the best teacher.

D. Success in living in a home abroad is guaranteed by certain operational controls.

E. It is achieved by enjoying the people of the home.

F. In general, most people living abroad never find themselves in a position where successful understanding can be achieved.

G. When going abroad in a group, one unsuccessful adjustment cancels the good effects of nine successes.

H. It is wise to promote understanding where misunderstanding is greatest.

2. OPERATIONAL ASSUMPTIONS

A. Principles dealing with the individual.

1. Selection.

a. Interest is the most important requirement for success and also the most difficult to recognize.

b. Excellence in academic grade is a very important indication of the high order of intelligence needed for success.

c. It is unfair both to the host and to the guest to expect success if they cannot communicate readily.

d. Leadership in extracurricular activities and excellent hobbies are important qualifications.

e. People active in religious or social activities are likely to be constantly interested in world understanding.

f. A personal interview provides little information in predicting success in living abroad.

g. Someone who knows The Experiment and the applicant provides the most accurate predictions of the success of The Experiment.

2. Training.

a. Friendships abroad are made by adjusting one's ways to a new culture and forgetting one's own culture for the time being.

b. The development of a receptive attitude is primary for successful adjustment.

c. The attitudes important for adjustment are humility, receptivity, and reserving judgment.

d. Extensive information about a country does not necessarily imply a sympathetic attitude; that is, the effective attitudes cannot be developed by giving information alone. They must be constructed by means of social pressures.

3. Leadership.

a. A leader must know the language of the country.

b. He must know the customs of the country from residence in it.

c. He must have a love of the people in the country which will be automatically transferred to his group members.

d. He must be older than the group members.

e. He must be of the same nationality as the group members so that he can understand their difficulties of adjustment.

f. He should know how to lead without giving orders.

g. He should know how to direct the thinking of the group without giving lectures.

B. Principles dealing with planning the experience.

1. Eight weeks is a short time in which to expect to make friends.

2. The criterion for the inclusion of an activity in the eight weeks' program is: Will it create friendship?

3. A group should be small enough so that the relations with the leader will be on a face-to-face basis.

4. The ideal group contains half boys and half girls.

5. When people of intelligence and good will formulate, as a group, the purpose of their summer's activities, the group members can enjoy a great measure of freedom of action, and at the same time profit from the controlled situation which The Experiment experience has provided.

Hans Moser, the newly acquired director for Switzerland, was asked to find a suitable place for us to meet for a week---a place that would not be distracting. He selected the small town of Heiden in eastern Switzerland, in the valley of the upper Rhine.

The delegation from the United States was quite large, for in addition to Gordon Boyce, Dick Gamble, a member of the Board of Trustees and myself, there were the following members of the Putney office staff: Florence Fisher, Mrs. "Marge" Prentiss, and Mrs. "Pat" Kirchberg. Florence Fisher was due a trip to Europe, a fringe benefit, and since she had never left Vermont before, she was greatly excited. The group was traveling on the S.S. United States and, as a very special distinction, had been invited to the Captain's cocktail party just before departure. The piles of sandwiches were arrayed beautifully and extensively. They were largely things that Florence had never seen before, like pickled herring and smoked salmon. Florence chose something with which she was better acquainted and with a voice of delighted appreciation exclaimed, "Raspberry jam!" She put an entire caviar sandwich into her mouth and immediately sprayed it out again, exclaiming, "Fish!" Everyone in the United States group had a wonderful time enjoying Florence's first trip to Europe.

In Appendix C is found the result of the work of the twenty-three people for six days.

Chapter Twenty-Two
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