A Fair Exchange

Dee Patterson, 27, a Chicago teacher, wanted to learn German before she takes a trip to Europe this summer. Olga Howard, 86, whose family spoke German when she was a child and who lives in Evanston, Ill., was anxious to teach the language. They both called the Learning Exchange, a service that connects people who want to learn something with people who want to teach it. The women have been meeting once a week ever since, and Mrs. Howard has "high hopes that Dee will be understood when she asks where to check her luggage" upon her arrival in Austria.

Some 20,000 other people in the Chicago area have been brought together --free of charge--by the Learning Exchange since it was set up four years ago. Now on the second floor of an Episcopal church in Evanston, the exchange is financed by several small grants from foundations; it has four full-time staff members, four telephones, and an information bank of 30,000 file cards that list the names and numbers of prospective students and teachers interested in more than 2,000 subjects--including such off-beat avocations as fire eating, flying saucers and fox hunting. Says Vice Chairman Denis Detzel: "The calls are an excellent way of keeping track of what people are into." When former President Nixon went to China, for example, dozens of people called who wanted to learn Chinese. Lately there has been a great demand for courses closer to home: plumbing, carpentry and auto repairs.

Some of the teachers listed with the exchange work in the city's public schools, but many are people who simply want to share their expertise and enthusiasm. For example, Charles Spielman, an aquatic biologist for Chicago's metropolitan sanitary district, teaches clowning; David Porter, who is blind and is studying for a master's degree in social work, teaches several different stringed instruments. Some teach without pay; others negotiate a fee with their students. Grace Jaffe, a retired sociology professor, teaches French to four teenagers, who tend her vegetable garden in return. Says she: "The young people seem to learn more outside the high school system."

Doctoral Students. The exchange was set up by Detzel, 29, and Bob Lewis, 34, former doctoral students at Northwestern University, who wanted to find new ways for talented people to teach outside a traditional classroom. Still dependent on grants, they are moving toward financial independence by selling memberships for $15 a year.

Word of the exchange's success has spread; calls have come in from more than 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada asking for information about learning-exchange systems. Meanwhile, Detzel and Lewis have earned praise from the educational establishment. Says B.J. Chandler, dean of Northwestern's school of education: "The formal educational system is groaning under the load put on it. We've got to lend our support to this kind of alternative."

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