Community Schools and the Education of the ‘Social Individual’

Abstract

'Community' is notorious for its many imprecise uses. Yet it is a word to which a response is expected and often intuitively given. As a label for an institution or an enterprise it proclaims to anyone who feels himself to be addressed 'this is for you'. Who is addressed and in what way it is 'for' him is not thereby made clear. It has been shown [1] that 'community' is not just a descriptive but also an evaluative concept, holding up a model of 'man as intrinsically social' rather than man as an individualist who contracts into society out of self-interest. The term labels an institution or policy as being concerned with people by virtue of their social relationships, their membership of a social group, not just as individuals. Common to most of its uses, however facile or deceptive, remains an echo of the idea that man's nature is defined in active relationship with other men. However this relational view of human nature is shared by many philosophies that otherwise differ greatly from each other. They range across a wide political spectrum, encompassing, for instance, both Marx's 'social individual' [2] and Buber's 'I-Thou' [3]. Hence 'community' is a very useful word with a capacity to mean all things to all men. It has been alleged that exhortation to 'community' is an active political tool, none the less effective for being used perhaps without overt intention. It is seen as a means of diverting attention away from fundamental economic and political issues, which are not of local origin at all. The latent function of the concept, in this view[4], is defence of the status quo, as well perhaps as nostalgia for the 'community' of traditional societies, as in the conservative tradition of Tonnies [5]. Criticism of this kind was levelled, for instance, at the Home Office Community Development Projects in the mid-1970s [6,7,8]. These were originally conceived as approaches to 'community work' and 'community participation' on the model of 'pluralist democracy'. Conflicts in the 'community' were thought to be resolvable by overt competition among clearly constituted interest groups, at the level of the urban locality. Conflict originating in the wider social structure and not susceptible to purely local manipulation was ignored. Yet in practice it was found that local groups were capable of perceiving their interests in broader terms, and community workers became increasingly disillusioned with theories of 'community' that appeared inconsistent with political reality. Nonetheless latent conflict among interest groups could be a force to generate 'community', though this is hard to demonstrate until the conflict becomes overt [9]. Community work experience suggests [10] that the major issues affecting an area, like the threat of redevelopment or road building, are those most likely to unite different groups. There is after all no reason why the 53