A community center; what it is and how to organize it

Front matter

^Orgarnze it

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' HENRT E;"

Part II— HOW TO ORGANIZE A COM- MUNITY CENTER . A Little Democracy

Membership in America The Community Secretary The Board of Directors The Trouble Committee Public and Self-support A Working Constitution Decrease of Organizations The House of the People Free Trade in Friendship

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CONTENTS

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Part III— THE PRACTICE OF CITIZEN- SHIP 97 The "Common House" .... 97

How It Works 98

A Village loi

A Country-side 104

A Suburb 108

A Small City 114

An Average City 117

A Big City 122

A State 126

A Half-finished Product . . .132 "Never so Baffled, But — " . .135

Lincoln's Mistake 138

The Meaning of the Flag . . 140

Part IV— A SUGGESTED CONSTITUTION 149 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Two Ambitions Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

A Suggested Symbol for the use of Community

Centers 39

Shoes which suggest a social program .... 97

LETTER OE TRANSMITTAL

Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Washington, February 19, 191 8.

Sir: To make more valuable to the people those things from which the people are accustomed to derive value has very appropriately been said to be the prime business of legislators. That the schoolhouse, whose value to the people is already great, may become still more valuable to them, is the purpose of the community-organization movement which this bureau has undertaken to foster.

A great democracy like ours, extending over more than three and one-half million square miles of territory and including more than 100,000,000 people must be alive, intelligent, and virtuous in all its parts. Every unit of it must be democratic. The ultimate unit in every State, Territory, and possession of the United States is the school district. Every school district should therefore be a little democracy, and the schoolhouse should be the

LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL

community capitol. Here the people should meet to discuss among themselves their common interests and to devise methods of helpful cooperation. It should also be the social center of the community, w^here all the people come together in a neighborly way on terms of democratic equality, learn to knov^ each other, and extend and enrich the community sympathies.

For this purpose the schoolhouse is specially fitted; it is nonsectarian and nonpartisan; the property of no individual, group, or clique, but the common property of all; the one place in every community in which all have equal rights and all are equally at home. The schoolhouse is also made sacred to every family and to the community as a whole by the fact that it is the home of their children and the training place of future citizens. Here all members of the community may appropriately send themselves to school to each other and learn from each other of things pertaining to the life of the local community, the State, the Nation, and the world.

The appropriation of the schoolhouse for community uses has well been called "a master

LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL

stroke of the new democracy." These facts are not new, but the emphasis on their importance is new and amounts to a new discovery. The Nation's immediate need to mobilize the sentiments of the people and to make available the material resources has directed special attention to the schoolhouse as an effective agency ready-made to its hand for this purpose. The national importance of this new organization is evidenced by the fact that the Council of National Defense has planned a nation-wide movement to organize school districts or similar communities of the United States as the ultimate branches of its council of defense system, believing that the organization of communities will enable the Council of National Defense to put directly before the individual citizen the needs of the Nation, to create and unify their sentiment, and to mobilize and direct their efforts for the- defense of the Nation.

In order that this organization may be most effective and be made permanent, the council has expressed a desire to cooperate with the Bureau of Education, and I have detailed one of the specialists in community organization to

LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL

cooperate with the council for the accomplishment of our common purpose. That the people may have information in regard to community organization in its simplest form, I recommend that the manuscript transmitted herewith be published as a bulletin of the Bureau of Education. It has been prepared at my request by Dr. Henry E. Jackson, the bureau's special agent in community organization.

Respectfully submitted.

P. P. Claxton,

Commissioner.

The Secretary of the Interior.

Part I What Is A Community Center? What It Is And How To Organize It

WHAT IS A COMMUNITY CENTER?

THE people's university "All men naturally desire knowledge," is the buoyant sentence with which Aristotle begins his great book on Ethics. It states our ground of hope for the possibility of progress and for the success of democracy. No democratic form of government can long endure without popular education or the means of acquiring it. The first and chief aim of the community center movement is to deepen the content and broaden the scope of the term "education" and to extend the activities of the public schools so that they may evolve into people's universities.

When it is remembered that only lo per cent of the adult citizens have had a highschool education and only 50 per cent have ever completed the grammar grades, it becomes apparent that one of our greatest national needs is a university for the education of grown men and women. The public school as a community center is the answer to this national need. The community center movement recognizes the fact that the mind matures more slowly than the body and that education is a life-long process. While the public school is dedicated primarily to the welfare of the child, it is becoming daily more evident that the Nation's welfare requires it to be used for adults and youths as well. Notwithstanding the fact that it is our finest American invention and the most successful social enterprise ever undertaken, its golden age lies before it. It is now being discovered anew in its possibilities for larger public service. The fact that all men naturally desire knowledge is the fact which has justified the investment of $1,347,000,000 in the public school equipment; it is the fact which now justifies the use of this equipment by adults. In every part of the country there is a manifest tendency for the public school to develop into a house of the people to be used by them for "mutual aid in self-development." This is the significant fact at the heart of the community center movement and the touchstone of its value for the national welfare.

THE COMMUNITY CAPITOL

"The walls of Sparta are built of Spartans," sang an old poet. The walls of America likewise are built of Americans. The primary function of the public schools is to make, not merely good men and women, but good citizens for the Republic. From the standpoint of citizenship, therefore, every schoolhouse ought to be used as a polling place. This is the first logical step toward making it the community capitol, although it may not be the first step chronologically. This use of the schoolhouse would save every State many thousands of dollars each year. When the people already own these houses, conveniently distributed in every section of the country, why should public funds be wasted in rent for other buildings? But economy, while a sufficient, is not the chief reason for making the schoolhouse a polling place. The best reason is the ideal for which the ballot box stands. It is the symbol of citizenship in America. As such it deserves a worthy place. In the last presidential election, President Wilson voted in a fire-engine house in Princeton, and Candidate Hughes voted in a laundry in New York City. Hitherto any kind of a place has been considered fit for the highest act of citizenship. In the Hebrew republic the symbol of the nation was a small richly decorated box called the "Ark of the Covenant." It was kept in the most honored place in the national Temple at the capital. The corresponding emblem in the American Republic is the ballot box. It ought to occupy a place befitting its importance. The one fitting place is the public schoolhouse, the community capitol and the temple of American democracy. Moreover, the voting instrument, which is the chief national emblem in every democracy, should be constructed with architectural dignity and established permanently in the schoolhouse because of the ideals it embodies and the supreme function it serves. It would thus be a perpetual reminder that the function of the school is to make citizens for the Republic.

It would cause the question repeatedly to be asked, What kind of school subjects are best calculated to make good citizens? It would help to keep the curriculum vitalized, by connecting it with practical and national processes.

It can continue to be vital only by the continued process of adapting itself to meet the Nation's expanding needs. A fixed curriculum is a false curriculum. The significant fact about a school is not the condition in which it is, but the direction in which it is moving. Its only safety, like that of an individual, lies in moving on. It will be stimulated to move on by making the practice of citizenship to be its goal. A constant reminder of the practice of citizenship is the presence of the polling instrument in the school.

THE COMMUNITY FORUM

It may or may not have been a mistake to have granted suffrage to the average man. An educational and character qualification for voting may now be the wiser policy to pursue in regard to both men and women, for no man is fit to govern another unless he has sufficient self-control to govern himself, and yet no man, however intelligent, can be trusted to govern another man without his consent. At any rate, universal manhood suffrage is the present fact, and nothing is so convincing as a fact. ' Inasmuch as the right to vote on public policies is now in the hands of the average man, it is of paramount importance that he should be given the opportunity to make himself fit to perform this function intelligently. This is the necessity on which the community forum fundamentally rests. It is a school for citizenship.

The community forum is the meeting of citizens in their schoolhouse for the courteous and orderly discussion of all questions which concern their common welfare. A community may begin with questions in which local interest is manifest, such as good roads, or public health, or the method of raising and spending public funds, or methods of production and transportation of food products. A discussion of these questions will reveal at once the fact that they transcend local limits. A road is built to go somewhere, and it will relate one community to another.^ Local health conditions can not be maintained without considering other localities, for the causes of local disease frequently lie elsewhere.

A local community pays part of the revenue raised by the county. The expenditure of these funds, therefore, is the affair of the local community. The same is true of the administration of State funds. The question of production and transportation is no longer regarded as a rural problem or a city problem, but a national problem. The reason why no community should live for itself is because none exists by itself. Every community is at the center of several concentric circles. The subjects of most value for discussion in a local forum are those which connect it with county, State, and National interests. And herein lies the educational value of the forum.

One of the folk high schools of Denmark maintains a regular study called "A Window in the West," the purpose of which is to acquire new ideas from England and America, that Denmark may use them for its own improvement. Such a course should be in the curriculum of every public school.

lo A COMMUNITY CENTER

The aim of the forum is to put a new window into the mental outlook of every community. The value of an open mind can not be calculated. Every great leader of the world's thought and action has insisted on its indispensable importance. Confucius expressed it in the golden phrase "mental hospitality." Socrates used a phrase out of which was coined the word "philosopher." He said, "I am not a wise man ; I am a lover of wisdom ; a seeker after new ideas." Jesus called it, "the spirit of truth." So highly did he regard it that he called it a holy spirit. The reason why these masterful leaders of men so prized the habit of being open-minded is because they understood that without mental hospitality no progress in any line is possible.

Ours is a Government by public opinion. It is obvious that the public welfare requires that public opinion be informed and educated. The forum is an instrument fitted to meet this most urgent public need. It is organized not on the basis of agreement, but of difference. It aims not at uniformity, but unity. It would be a stupid and unprogressive world if all were forced to think alike. We are under

A COMMUNITY CENTER ii

no obligation to agree with each other, but as neighbors and as members of America it is our moral and patriotic duty to make the attempt to understand each other.

Public discussion renders a great variety of services to spiritual and social progress. It puts a premium on intelligence, liberates a community from useless customs, puts a check on hasty action, secures united approval for measures proposed, creates the spirit of tolerance, promotes cooperation, and best of all and hardest of all it equips citizens with the ability to differ in opinion without differing in feeling. This habit can be acquired only through practice. The forum furnishes the means for mutual understanding. It aims to create public-mindedness.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD CLUB The basic assumption of the community center movement is that democracy is the organization of society on the basis of friendship. *^Man is a political animal," said Aristotle. He requires the companionship of his fellows. His happiness is largely linked up with their approval. His instinctive need for fellowship leads him to create a sort of social center out of anything available for the purpose. The post office has served as such a village center, but the free delivery of mail is destroying its social uses. The corner store has acquired fame as an informal forum and neighborly club, but the mail-order house is rapidly robbing it of members, and at best it serves only a few. The saloon has served the purpose of a neighborhood club and friendly meeting place on equal terms for large numbers of men, but moral and economic considerations have doomed it to extinction.

The post office, corner store, and saloon are passing as social centers, but they must be replaced with something better if they are not to be replaced with something worse. For only he can destroy who can replace. The public school therefore stands before an open door of opportunity to become a neighborhood club, where the people can meet on terms which preserve their self-respect. Almost every individual lives in the center of several concentric circles. There is the little inner circle of his intellectual and spiritual comrades; then the larger circle of his friends;

beyond that the still larger circle of those with whom the business of life brings him into contact; and the largest circle of all includes all members of the community as fellow citizens. There need be no conflict among these circles, no suggestion of inferiority or superiority. It is never to be forgotten that these circles are concentric. The experiences of life make them natural and necessary.

The community center is limited only by this last and largest circle. It seeks to broaden the basis of unity among men, to multiply their points of contact, to consider those interests which all have in common. It is not difficult to discover that the interests, which unite men, are bigger, both in number and importance, than those which separate them. The list of things which can only be achieved as joint enterprises is long. Roads can only be built by community cooperation. Only so can the community's health be safeguarded. Food, clothing, and shelter are the common needs of all. Production and transportation are therefore questions of social service. The Greek word for "private," peculiar to one's self, unrelated to the interest of others, is the original of our word *'idiot." The corresponding modern term in our common speech is ''crank." The community center is a sure cure for ''cranks." It aims to promote public-mindedness.

The schoolhouse used as a neighborhood club renders therefore an invaluable public service. It seeks to create the neighborly spirit essential for concerted action. The means employed are various — games, folk dances, dramas, chorus singing — vs^hich require the subordination of self to cooperative efifort, dinner parties, w^here the people break bread in celebration of their communion w^ith each other as neighbors. These activities not only render a service to the individual by promoting his happiness and decreasing his loneliness, they discover in the community unsuspected abilities and unused resources. To set them to w^ork not only develops the individual but enriches the community life.

The same is true of the spirit of play in general. To cultivate the spirit of play not only meets an instinctive human need for physical and mental recreation, but renders a distinctive service to democracy on account of its spiritual value. One can carry on the work of destruction by himself, but he must organize in order to produce. He must cooperate in order to play. He can not monopolize the victory; he must share it with the team. Play thus develops the spirit of sportsmanship, the willingness to play fair, the capacity to be a good loser.

It thus becomes apparent that the neighborhood club furnishes the key to the possible solution of a variety of problems — the Americanization problem, for example. The object of the community-center movement is to achieve ^^freemen's citizenship," both for native and foreign-born alike. But citizenship means membership. It is obvious that the teaching of English to aliens is not sufficient to make them members of America. To acquire the language as a means of communication with their fellows is, of course, a necessary preliminary. But it is only a means to an end. If they are ever to feel that they belong with us, the right hand of fellowship must be extended to them. The neighborhood spirit alone can create in them the spirit of America. One of the by-laws of the constitution of the Hebrew republic was to this effect: "Love ye, therefore, the resident alien for ye were resident aliens in the land of Egypt." This law does not enjoin citizens to teach them the language of the land. The necessity for that is assumed. The chief thing needful, it says, is to love them. Friendliness is not only the soul of democracy but also the most successful method of securing practical results. The community center is the most available and effective instrument through which this method can be applied. The process of Americanization consists essentially not in learning a language but in acquiring a spirit.

Cooperation and the spirit of sportsmanship are indispensable qualities for citizens of a democracy. The spirit and purpose of a neighborhood club are clearly suggested by the significant questions asked and answered by a negro bishop of Kansas. "When is a man lost?" he asked. "A man is never lost when he doesn't know where he is, for he always knows where he is wherever he is. A man is lost when he doesn't know where the other folks are."

THE HOME AND SCHOOL LEAGUE

The free public school is at once the product and safeguard of democracy. The kind of public school, therefore, which a community has, is an accurate index of its community consciousness and its estimate of democratic ideals. "The average farmer and rural teacher," says T. J. Coates, "think of the rural school as a little equipment where a little teacher, at a little salary, for a little while, teaches little children little things." The object of the home and school department of the community center is to substitute the word "big" for the word "little" in the above statement, to magnify the work and function of the school, to make it worthy to occupy a larger place in the people's thought and affection. This is the work which Home and School Leagues are now doing. The community center in no wise interferes with their work. It is not a rival but an ally. Its plan is to give to and not to take from the Home and School League. Indeed, it is probable that the Home and School League quite generally, may become the parent organization out of which will be born the community center. This is the natural and logical thing to happen, and in many places it is the process of development now in operation. Wherever this occurs it is against the natural order for the mother to be jealous of the daughter. If and when a Home and School League expands itself into a community center, it ought to become a department of the community organization.

By becoming a department of a larger organization and limiting itself to its own special task, the Home and School League will not only do its work better, but will find it more than sufficient to occupy all its time. Its specific work is to promote the progress of the school and to improve the school equipment. To this end it seeks to secure closer cooperation between the home and school, the parents and teachers. When Madame de Stael asked Napoleon what was needed to improve the educational system of France, he replied, '^Better mothers.'' The noblest influence on any child is that of a good mother. Every school, therefore, ought to strive to keep a close bond between the home and itself. It ought to do so not only for the sake of the children while they are in school but also before they come to school and after they leave it. To build battlements around girls and boys at the point of their greatest danger, during the period between 16 and 21, when they are most neglected, is a task worthy in itself to enlist the deepest interest and occupy the entire energy of the Home and School League.

The three unsettled questions which schoolmasters are always debating — the content of the curriculum, the method of teaching, and the business management — will be illuminated if there is brought to bear upon them the viewpoint of parents who own and support the schools and who are interested to get the proper return on their investment. The same will be true of all school questions if considered from the standpoint of the community center. It will connect school activities with life processes. This means vitality for the school. For, as the great educational reformer Grundtvig said, ^'Any school that has its beginning in the alphabet and its ending only in book learning is a school of death."

Inasmuch as the key to a better school is a better teacher, the home and school department of the community center will make it its special aim to develop the type of teacher described in Herbert Quick's ^'The Brown Mouse." It will endeavor to secure for teachers not only a larger degree of moral support but more adequate financial support, which is not the only thing needful, but the first thing needful toward the attainment of this goal. The constructive service rendered to the Republic by public-school teachers is as important, if not the most important, rendered by any class of public servants, and they are not mercenary or lacking in heroic devotion to the common welfare. But it is idle to expect that the right type of teacher can be secured or retained without a decent living wage. If Henry Ford is able to make $5 the minimum daily wage for the work of producing his machines, there is still more justification for fixing this as the minimum for the far more delicate and difficult business of making citizens for the Nation. When a community offers such a wage, then and then only will it be able to secure a $5 type of person for the position. In order to retain them after they are secured there ought to be a school manse — a teachers' house — as part of the necessary equipment of every school. Proper support and housing in order to secure the right type of teacher in itself constitutes a worthy program for this department.

The home and school department will naturally have charge of such school-extension activities as evening classes for youths and adults. These classes should be designed not only as a part of the work in the Americanization of immigrants, but for the better equipment of all citizens. "It is the prime business of legislators," said Confucius, "to make more valuable to the people those things from which the people are accustomed to derive value." This states in brief the function of the home and school department. The Nation's destiny was decided at the beginning by the establishment, for the first time in the modern world, of a free public-school system. To keep vital its processes and to improve its equipment that it may be still more valuable to the people is the chief business of this department.

THE COMMUNITY BANK

The purpose of discussion in a community forum is not entertainment but action. It is responsible discussion ; that is, it is discussion by citizens who bear the responsibility for voting on the questions under discussion. Such questions will be many and various. Some will have a temporary and some a permanent value. They will naturally grow out of community-center activities. But in order to guarantee that these social recreational and educational activities shall be related to life there ought to be established one or two departments to meet concrete human needs.

One of the best of these is a community bank, for it not only meets a practical need but also cultivates an ethical view of money and uses it as a means of moral culture. A community bank is primarily a savings bank both for children and adults. As regards children, it ought, so far as possible, to be a part of the curriculum of the school. Such banks are now conducted in many schools for children. Cooperative banks are conducted for adults in some States under the name of credit unions. New York State has a good law on credit unions, on which the laws of other States have been modeled.

But a real community bank is designed to serve other purposes than those of saving. Its aim is to multiply the efficiency of the people's savings by pooling them for cooperative uses. Its aim is to capitalize character and to democratize credit. It serves a community use by enabling the people to do jointly what they can not do separately. By clubbing their resources they can use their own money for their own productive purposes.

Such a bank operated for the common welfare will not only furnish the working capital for community enterprises, but will also be a loan society. It will make short-time loans to its members on reasonable terms. It will thus become the salvation of the poor from the tyranny and degradation of the loan shark. It will also make large long-time loans to young men and women who desire to marry and start homes, in order to enable them to become the owners of houses. It will permit them to repay the loan on the amortization plan. No community could render a more statesmanlike service to its members. The service already rendered by building and loan associations, which are in fact cooperative banks, is a guarantee of the success of the plan. There are in the United States 7,034 such associations, with a membership of 3,568,342, and assets amounting to $1,696,707,041. These figues are eloquent and tell a significant story. They show how ready is the response of men to the opportunity of owning their own houses and that this opportunity needs to be vastly extended. The motto of the United States league of these associations is "The American Home, the Safeguard of American Liberties." The motto is both sentimental and accurately true. The well-being of a nation depends primarily upon the existence of conditions under which family life may be promoted and fostered. The family is the true social unit, older than church or state and more important than either. The welfare of family life is every statesman's chief concern.

The community bank enters not only a vitally important but a practically unoccupied field, and will meet felt needs unmet at present. The cooperative handling of credit is not new. It has been done in Europe for 50 years with marked success. The community bank is the adaptation to American conditions of the Raiffeisen Bank of Germany, the Luzzatti Bank of Italy, and the Government Bank of New Zealand. It is a democratic bank; that is, it is of the people, in that it receives the people's money; it is by the people, in that it is operated by the people themselves; it is for the people, in that the money is used for the welfare of the people who saved it.

A community bank's ability to render these needed public services depends wholly on the people's desire and capacity to save and their willingness to pool their savings. To cultivate the habit of thrift is the first necessity. That America needs to acquire this habit is too obvious to need comment. Americans are the least provident of peoples. Compared with a list of 14 other nations, the number of people out of every thousand who have savings accounts is only about one-sixth as many in America as in the nation highest on this list, and less than one-half as many as in the nation lowest on the list. Switzerland stands highest, with 554. Denmark is next, with 442.