BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

41. . Every community, rich or poor, urban or suburban, has astonishingly
rich resources within it if we are prepared to recognize them, help citizens
to organize them and put them to use. And every community has special
local characteristics and inventories of unique physical inheritance
on which to graft new proposals and to build. From an outside vantage
point the barrios appear to be poor, and the people uneducated, with little
hope of integration into the mainstream of careers and "upward mobility"
in the city. But from the point of view of the barrio people themselves,
education and skill development for children and adults alike is supremely
important. They have therefore built schools through self-help and volunteer
labour and materials, and volunteer teachers from the barrios run
them with the aid of outside volunteers such as Peace Corps workers, using
whatever local resources they can muster for curricula and workshop training,
(l) At a more sophisticated level the parents of the school children
attending the Human Resources Center in Pontiac,(2) discovered that they
too had unique resources which conventional education left untapped. Once
one sees beyond the fact that the barrios are crude and the Pontiac Human
Resources Center is sophisticated, the parallels between the former and
the latter are striking.
42. In Pontiac, as in the barrios, the citizens began the process of
articulating local needs and resources in a spirit of revolt, and began
working to implement identified objectives. The process began after the
assassination of the famous black leader, Martin Luther King, in Memphis,
Tennessee, in 1967. This incident sparked revolt in the black communities
of several big U.S. industrial cities, including Pontiac. The general
thrust was civil rights and neighborhood self-determination. In Pontiac
the issue of a new school was seized. Quickly the community perceived
that "education" meant a lot more than the construction of a school for
children. If. education was to have an impact on increasing the quality
of life in the community, it had to relate directly and meaningfully to
particular issues in that community and not only to "national standards".
And in identifying the particular issues, the citizens pointed out that the
most important product of education is skill development, primarily related
to employment and career opportunities as they exist in that particular
1) Freedom to Build, op.cit.; Charles Abrams, op.cit.
2) Margrit Kennedy, "From Individual Projects towards City-Wide Networks"
Building for School and Community: III. United States, page 25 of the
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present volume; also Larry Molloy, Community/School: Sharing the
Space and the Action, Educational Facilities Laboratories Inc., New York,
1973.
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