Innocents Abroad

Until the early twentieth century, teachers went abroad with assumptions of their own superiority. But by the mid-twentieth century, they became far more self-questioning about their social assumptions, their educational theories, and the complexity of their role in a foreign society. Drawing on extensive archives of teachers' letters and accounts, Zimmerman's narrative explores the teachers' shifting attitudes about their country and themselves, in a world that was more unexpected than they could have imagined.