BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

and learning through and in relation to this life."(l) "Individualised
instruction", "project method" and above all "progressive education" were
the catchwords of the time." In the period after the first World War with
its penetrating societal changes in Europe, one saw "Democracy through
Education" as a mandate from America. "The democratic problem in education
is not primarily a problem of training children;-it is a problem of making
a community within which children cannot help growing up to be democratic,
intelligent, disciplined to freedom, reverent to the goals of life, and
eager to share in the tasks of the age. Schools cannot produce the
result, nothing but the community can do so." (2)
13. The Great Depression (1929-31) which followed the "Black Friday" of
1929 brought the problems and interests of the community - particularly
small, rural communities - again into the foreground and oriented
education again on immediate local needs. The school acquired new importance
as a practical resource in an often dramatic struggle for
existence. The dual use of school rooms for educational and community
purposes came about because of the economic situation. The educational
- endeavours of these years were characterised as a "mixture of economic
emergency and philosophical idealism". A changed attitude towards
educational development can be seen in the large number of publications
on school and education, and volumes on educational problems which
appeared in the thirties, forties and fifties.
14. As a result of a widened interest in politics and a greater world
interest in the politics of America, Ellwood P. Cubberly in Public Education
in the United States published in 1934, made the demand "that the public
school must become the single, large, active power apart from politics and
religious sects and bring about results by becoming a center for the
formation and creation of a community way of thinking"; Samuel Everett,
in a report to the Committee on the Community School defined community
education "as an organizational process which, at the same time, is an
expression of and an instrument for the purposes of the citizenry".
In the book, The Community School, which Everett edited in 1938, descriptions
of various projects and programs and their varying assumptions
appeared. "All of life is education," wrote E. G. Olson in School and
Community,1945, and therewith confirmed the assumption that learning
should not stop with the school. This view of education as a continuous
process was accepted quite generally after the thirties. During this
period, the community school movement began to spread throughout America.
1) John Dewey, School and Society, 1900.
2) Joseph K. Hart, The Discovery of Intelligence, New York: The Century
Co., 1924, p.382.
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