Natives of the Future: Children and U.S. Foreign Development during the Cold War Era

In the two decades following the Second World War, American efforts to “modernize” the newly characterized developing world found expression in infrastructure and technical assistance projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But modernization efforts did not give rise solely to new factories and dams; nor were they the exclusive domain of government officials and technocrats. During the 1950s and 1960s, several American voluntary agencies active in overseas development work established programs on behalf of children and their caretakers as a means of promoting “modernization” and economic development. These agencies looked to methods of child-rearing as a means of imbuing foreign citizens with the personality traits that they understood to be conducive to national progress. They situated personal transformations as the engine of global change, grounding political and economic revolutions in the individual drama of human development.

This paper examines the efforts of American voluntary agencies working with children in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa as a component of the United States’ modernizing mission. By training parents in new methods of child-rearing and by establishing playschools for young children, American voluntary workers sought to support the United States’ efforts to modernize the developing world. But in situating children as the key to international development, American voluntary agencies also exposed fundamental tensions within the modernization project itself.