Teaching Basic English to the World: International Broadcasting, Language Education, and Anglo-American Ideologies of Civilization, 1935–43

Dr. Krysko’s comments will discuss the implications of his research for the relationship between the local and the global as well as the circulation of knowledge and practices between different regions of the globe. In 1938, the Boston-based World Wide Broadcasting Foundation (WWBF) and Harvard-based British scholar I.A. Richards launched an initiative to teach “Basic English” to peoples throughout the world. Basic English was a greatly simplified form of English that had aspirations of becoming a “world language” understood by peoples across the globe; as such the Basic system laid claim to promoting international peace and beneficial cross-cultural exchanges if it became common language through which all peoples could communicate. Well matched to this goal, the WWBF itself was founded in 1935 as a vehicle to help radio achieve its own long-touted potential of promoting international peace and beneficial cross-cultural exchanges. Upon closer inspection, though, the WWBF-Basic educational initiative, which unfolded in the shadow of the Second World War, actually reflected more insular Anglo-American notions of civilization and the presumed superiority of the English-speaking Anglo-American peoples. Dr. Krysko’s discussion will be based on archival research into the project’s Rockefeller Foundation (RF) files (the philanthropic organization having enthusiastically funded the effort). These archives provide the evidentiary base into the worldviews and strategies of the project’s biggest proponents at the WWBF, Harvard, and the RF. Those archives also contain some of the voluminous correspondence sent to the WWBF from listeners throughout the world. Dr. Krysko’s comments will thus illustrate the ways in which seemingly genuine idealistic internationalist visions that inspired truly globalist initiatives like the WWBF-Basic collaboration can nonetheless still serve as little more than a cloak for the more myopic and provincial impulses that have long been woven into the fabric of the globalizing world.