Getting Off the Base

Each weekday morning, a blue U.S. Air Force bus grinds slowly up the hills of Sonnenberg, West Germany, between ancient gabled houses and the ruins of a castle. At the Konrad Duden elementary school, it discharges a noisy load of American grade-school children from nearby Wiesbaden. Minutes later they are answering Frau Hertha Viehweger's questions--in easy, fluent German.

"Wieviel Tage hat die Woche?" asks the teacher. Hands fly up. "Die Woche hat sieben Tage," answers twelve-year-old Carol Ross, with just a trace of Boston in her eager voice. In the next classroom. Teacher Nancy Albaugh, an Ohio girl who customarily works in the U.S. Air Force dependents' school in Wiesbaden, is getting 25 enthusiastic German children to tell about the days of the week in English. Later, the classes mix, sing alternate stanzas of Go Down Moses and Nach gruener Farb, mein Herz verlangt. After two weeks of Americans' visiting Germans, the German children come to the American school for a fortnight, and so it goes all year.

"A National Loss." Until recently, most of the 160,000 students in the Defense Department's overseas dependents' schools (which together form a system almost as big as Houston's) were insulated from the cultures surrounding them. In most American garrisons, servicemen and their families live in self-contained housing projects, shop at base stores, attend base movies and churches, scarcely taste the speech and culture of the unfamiliar country beyond the guardposts. In 1960, of the 30,000 pupils who were then enrolled in Air Force schools in Europe, only 980 were taking foreign-language courses.

This year, largely through the efforts of one man who wants to break down these barriers, the Air Force is combining the best of both worlds--Old and New. In the Air Force's European school system (which includes North Africa and the Middle East), more than 20,000 pupils are studying foreign languages in the style of Sonnenberg-Wiesbaden. John Anton Carpenter, 31, the energetic coordinator of foreign languages for the system, believes that "to allow American children to live among foreign people without coming to know that people, its problems and greatness, is a national loss." Carpenter came to the coordinator's post nearly three years ago armed with a plan for eliminating that loss. Serving as a science and language teacher at Chateauroux airbase in France, he had seen how quickly children learned a language when they were exposed to it directly. Carpenter's first step was to organize the Sonnenberg-Wiesbaden exchange program for third-to sixth-graders. The pilot project, while slow going at first, soon got into high gear. "After one year of this kind of direct instruction, the children lose all shyness," beams one of the participating Germans, Frau Viehweger. "They speak--naturally not quite correctly, but without inhibition."

On to Pakistan. The program spread rapidly. Carpenter is on the fly constantly (he has spent only seven months of the past two years at his office), making arrangements with local teachers and principals, talking to education ministries. He made 272 trips over the short road to the state capital at Mainz to close an agreement with the Rhineland-Palatinate authorities.

Conservative school administrators were skeptical that children of different nationalities could be instructed in the same school, reluctantly agreed to "occasional" visits. But Carpenter doggedly insisted that the language experience must be more than "a visit to the zoo," finally won the principle of at least three exchange visits a week. Pushing on to other countries, he set up language exchanges in Pakistan (for Urdu), Libya and Morocco (for Arabic).

He also expanded conventional language classes. To overcome the shortage of French instructors, he talked the French Ministry of Education into assigning some of its own teachers to Air Force schools, coaxed from the Ministry an offer of 35 scholarships to a seminar for French language teachers this summer at the University of Besanc,on. A recent Defense Department survey of dependents' schooling overseas found the general system to be riddled with shortcomings, but cited John Carpenter's persistent, polyglot language program as "deserving unique commendation."

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