Stanford Scholars Promote Education Across Globe

Zaher wahab's education took him from the dirt floor of an Afghan village school to the doctoral program of the Stanford International Development Education Center (SIDEC).

This School of Education program—predecessor to the current international comparative education program—recruited about half its graduate students from developing countries. Its faculty encouraged students like Wahab to return to their home countries and become educational and political leaders.

In short, they were to change the world.

Alejandro Toledo, MA ’72, MA ’74, PhD ’93, the president of Peru, is the program’s most famous graduate. Other alumni include Jorge Antonio Serrano Elías, MA ’73, a former president of Guatemala; Pius Yasebasi Ng’wandu, MA ’78, PhD ’81, the minister of science, technology and higher education of Tanzania; and Keith Bezanson, PhD ’72, former Canadian ambassador to Peru and Bolivia. Wahab, the senior adviser to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Higher Education, works alongside three other SIDEC graduates in Afghanistan’s educational infrastructure.

SIDEC was founded in 1965 by the late Paul Hanna, MA ’36, PhD ’39, a professor of education. The newfound global awareness that started after World War II had crested into an international development movement. The Fulbright Program started in 1946; President John F. Kennedy launched both the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps in 1961.

SIDEC became a natural destination for qualified Peace Corps returnees, recalls Robert Textor, a retired professor of education and anthropology who was among the first to teach in SIDEC. “We used the term ‘scholar-doers.’ We wanted graduates to be good scholars but active doers as well. No one from the so-called ‘developed’ world got in unless they had a meaningful transcultural or development experience.”

Wahab remembers studying alongside students from Kenya, the Philippines, Germany, Brazil and the United States, sharing ideas from an array of cultural and life experiences. The faculty, Wahab says, “knew they were educating the future ministers of education, if not the future prime ministers, of those countries.”