Teaching Loyalty
Teaching Loyalty
Educational Development and the Strategic Hamlet Program
This chapter considers efforts to develop South Vietnam’s education system.The discussion centers on the US Operations Mission and International Voluntary Services(IVS) education advisers who introduced American-style schools and English-language instruction.These aid workers believed that their efforts would not only help modernize South Vietnamese society but also advance counterinsurgency aims.To explore the tension between those often-competing impulses, the chapter examines the IVS education team’s involvement in the strategic hamlet program.Its participation in strategic hamlets represented IVS’s most striking acceptance of a South Vietnamese and US policy that had little connection to humanitarian or economic development but rather accelerated military escalation in Vietnam.
Keywords: Education, Schools, Strategic hamlet program, International Voluntary Services (IVS), Ethnic minorities