One can imagine the sober disillusionment of UNESCO when, seven years
after Jomtien, it has to admit that there is a widespread international
misunderstanding about what exactly a Community School is. An
institution by no means deserves the name Community School simply when a
community builds a conventional school and more or less manages to
finance it. Does this mean one should take another approach altogether?
Forget the school, and concentrate instead on Open Learning Communities
right from the start? Can schools, whose institutional self-preserving
persistence resembles the lock of a strongbox, ever be cracked open?
Where are the pressure points? And where are the safecrackers?"
"The Paper contains three major parts and a smaller supplement. Part I
describes the concept of Community Education and, in the form of two
documentary accounts, an illustration of the idea in two widely
differentiating examples. The limits of Community Schools are outlined
(Chapter 3) and ways of opening them to the community discussed (Chapter
4) - it is a movement from within towards the outer world. One could
also start right off from the outside, however (Chapter 5), looking at
the school as a peripheral facility and - when it is willing to open
itself - including the school in what is actually happening beyond the
school gates." (Page 1)
PART I: Pulling down walls frees the view
1. THE PARADIGM OF COMMUNITY EDUCATION
The roots of Community Education reach far back into the past. In
1896 John Dewey
initiated his experiment "School-As-Social-Center" in Chicago and so
gave impetus to a movement which extended well into the 1920's and 40's,
particularly in the USA and Great Britain, gaining importance in the
60's and then spreading internationally. Exemplary for this development
is the International
Community Education Association (ICEA) which was founded in the
1970's, whose goal is to promote the concept of Community Education and
help form a working network of worldwide initiatives. Today ICEA is
represented in some 90 countries, accredited by the Council of Europe,
and has operational relations with UNESCO.
Community Education stands for learning in the community, with
the community, and
for the community. [See
Communitarianism] It is to be understood as an integrating element
of urban, community, and regional development efforts, contributing to
the construction and reconstruction of economic infrastructure, cultural
vitality and diversity, ecological consciousness and structural forms.
Community Education serves to expand individual and communal
responsibility aimed at taking action for the improvement in the
quality of life. Hence Community
Education means interventional learning in the Polis, and
assumes that learning persons are also active social, economical,
ecological, and political beings. The concept adheres to the belief
that sustainable development as called for by the UNO in 1992 in Rio de
Janeiro can only then take place when problem-solving is implemented on
the local level and carried out by many people. In turn, impulses
springing from activities at the local level can grow into contributions
to solutions of global problems. (Page 3)
If one attempts to summarize the foregoing comments into a
programmatical catalog of points, the following distinguishing features
of Community Education emerge as important:
* Community education is a
holistic approach which supports the learning in, with and for
the community. It counts on self-reliance, mobilizes the power of
communities and focuses them on sustainable development, on the
solution of social, cultural, technological, economic and ecological
problems. All the social and all the age groups of the population
can be involved. That is why community education overcomes the
separatism of "hyphen-pedagogies", when the project allows it; it is
more than just adult education or vocational training. It works in
an integrating way.
* The key
problems and situations of the people in the community
are the starting point of the learning process. As generative
themes in the sense expressed by Paulo Freire, many of these
problems and situations have more than just a local meaning, they
also contain supra-regionally relevant parts. The search for local
alternative forms of energy can become a contribution to prevent
global climatic changes. Many local problems (with their global
aspects) cannot be solved without the supporting approach or
community education. This is true for family planning just as much
as for dealing with our natural resources in a responsible way.
* Community education is never just education, but always
organization and action as well. Thus the application of
acquired knowledge and abilities in complex real-life situations
becomes an integral part of the learning process. Not only is the
subject the point of concentration, but also the situation that
should be dealt with and improved. That is why community education
never just aims at the qualification of people, but also at a
constructive dealing with the reality in which these people are
living.
* Community education is especially sensitive and responsible
with regard to the living conditions of marginalized ethnic groups.
It supports social movements that aim at overcoming this
marginalization. It makes an effort for full equal rights of women.
It promotes the realization of human rights, the integration and
acceptance of ethnic, cultural or religious minorities, it has an
intercultural and antiracist orientation. It becomes active against
the isolation of handicapped people.
* Community Education and popular economics
[socialist economics] work
together in many cases. From the beginning ICEA has seen and
emphasized the importance of economics from below as a way out of
marginalization. Here ICEA above all emphasizes the promotion of
entrepreneurship. For where there is a lack of jobs, people have to
be able to create jobs themselves. ICEA supports those, often from
the informal sector, who want to get access to the regular market.
* Community education is an answer to specific weaknesses of
institutions and curricula in the formal educational sector.
Learning as participation in sustained development does not need any
artificial motivation. It is easier to put new insights into
reality. Academic knowledge is used for concrete problems and not
taught in an alienated form. Knowledge and abilities can be acquired
in a process of investigating learning with a close connection of
theory and practice. Community schools are referring to local needs
with their curriculum, they reconstruct the relationship to the
neighborhood and lead children and adolescents at an early point and
more intensively than traditional schools to social fields of
action. (Pages 5-6)
This also outlines the paradigm of
community education in contrast to conventional educational approaches:
* Learning processes are not cut up
into meaningless units and placed beyond reality. Community
education lays emphasis on holistic learning in meaningful
connections. Technical qualifications with instruments are
learnt in an enlightened social context.
Learning does not take place in parameters of phony security where
tasks, the method of solving the problem and the solution are all
known beforehand. Instead, learning takes place in the uncertainty
of complex reality. People learn in a close theory-practice
correlation. Community education favors the inquiring and
discovering type of learning -learning through productive action.
* Community education emphasizes development of the curriculum from
the bottom up instead of the top down. Subjects do not structure it
but key situations and key problems. Their analysis makes the
classification of desirable qualifications possible which allow
autonomous, competent action and solidarity. The connection
with key situations [using crisis to
manipulate feelings and imagination] initiates learning
processes close to reality and a focus of scientific knowledge on
real problems.
* Community education contributes to an opening of educational
institutions to social action fields without being fixed to
educational institutions. Here it is accepted that important
social learning processes take place - especially under
conditions of marginalization -beyond the walls of educational
institutions.
* Community educators are not shaped by white-collar convictions,
they do not migrate from the land and they do not rely on
teacher-proof curricula. They interpret learning as an active
participation in local and regional development. They combine
brain-work with manual work.
Projects aimed at developing an Open
Learning Community would mistake their role if they did not become
critical and simultaneously constructive adversary of only pragmatic
variants of Community Education; the development of standards of
excellence is necessary right there, where due to their existential
situation, people cannot afford to grind through an examination-ridden
curriculum alienated from reality.
See also
Facilitating
permanent social change
Using
Dissatisfaction (a crisis) for social transformation