Personal Experiences
restriction on who was to be invited to the dissemination conferences. As I mentioned above, this is a profoundly American process. In the particular position in which I find myself, having voluntarily come to the United States to make my work available to all in the United States and through the United States to the rest of the world, I am satisfied in saying that to have an impact on education in the world, there is no better country to start from than this one. *** In 1954 while in England, I developed an approach to teaching foreign languages which I then tested in a number of countries. This led me to publish a book in 1963 on the subject and the materials for three languages: English, French, and Spanish. Only two reviews of that book appeared, and both were in professional journals in the United States. From 1968, a growing number of people — mainly in the United States — began to experiment with the approach. When it came to the notice of some Peace Corps volunteers and administrators, it took only a short time to be tested in a larger number of countries and, when found valuable, supported still more widely. “The Silent Way,” as the approach is named, is now known much better and much more widely than would have been possible from anywhere else. My presence in New York City may have been of some help, since I am more easily accessible for consultation and demonstration. Perhaps I can contribute more to the understanding of what American education has to offer the world by citing three more examples taken from my personal experience. Because I am entitled to become a citizen of this country and because the experiences mentioned took place in this country, they may count as originating from here. The first concerns the Open Admissions policy of the City University of New York, the second an experimental school in the Bronx, and the third a reading program that was aired in the United States by a commercial network.
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