PREFACE

It is time to take a long, hard look at youth exchanges. After some forty years, "exchanges" have not only become commonplace but "big business", both commercially and politically. Nonetheless, some people remain sceptical. Is not time spent "out of the system" lost? What in fact justifies uprooting young people from their familiar environments and transplanting them to alien cultures where they are likely to
represent disturbing, outside influences?

Youth exchanges emerged from two world wars as an extension of international solidarities developed on battlefields where youths were being slaughtered wholesale. The first ralying cry was for "the promotion of of peace through mutual understanding between nations". Since then, however, in the international arena, warfare has been largely replaced by economic struggle and the cry for peace is no longer perceived as a valid reason for wanting to participate in an "exchange".

Nonetheless, exchanges have established themselves, if only through their own, internal logic. Somehow, whatever their stated aim, youth exchanges work. They work because of the generosity of host communities and the adaptability of visiting youths. The accumulated wisdom of tens of thousands of years of collective human experience lies behind the success of what prove to be enriching and, in the words of their participants, "life changing" experiences.

In attempting to come to terms with this poorly understood phenomenon, it is interesting to compare today's "exchanges" with two other forms of "youth instruction": firstly, with the rites of passage in "primitive" societies and secondly, with the process of apprenticeship in medieval European trade guilds.

The so-called "primitive" society prepares its youth to assume its rightful place in the world through an initiation rite unfolding as a series of dramatic events: ritual preparation, radical change of conditions, trials and tribulations and finally "the return".

The guilds ensured the transmission of their knowledge and values through a highly evolved system, one component of which required that the youth temporarily trade his familiar surroundings for life with a new family "elsewhere" under the guidance of Mother and Master.

Both these examples refer to practices which were based upon a coherent view of the world, bringing us back to the essential question: what vision and values underlie what we know today as youth exchanges? The first step in answering this question is to recall the effons and "spirit" of all those who have preceded us in the promotion of "the intercultural experience".