‘The World We Want’: Educating Cold War Youth in Internationalism

The New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum was an exercise in idealistic internationalism, cold war propaganda and global citizenship education. For 25 years 30 handpicked teens from around the world spent 3 months in New York attending US schools, living in American families, meeting celebrities, senators and the occasional president, and debating contentious issues on TV. British students attended annually, and included future journalists, academics, diplomats and a government minister, such as Maureen Cleave, John Torode, Keith Hopkins, Lady Suzanne Warner, and Michael Portillo, to name a few. This paper places the Forum within the context of contemporaneous exchange programs. It explores the delegates’ role as ‘walking textbooks’, both within schools and on TV, designed to represent the voices of youth in an era when young people were becoming increasingly strident on their own account. 

Dr Catherine Bishop holds a Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at Macquarie University. She is the author of the award-winning Minding Her Own Business, Women Mean Business, & Too Much Cabbage and Jesus Christ. Her latest book is The World We Want: The New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum and the Cold War Teenager (September 2024).