The curriculum and the community school

Abstract

THE HOPE that children may grow into satisfactory and satisfied members of a better social order is not a new one. Aristotle faced the problems involved and his great disciple Plato in his Republic produced one of the early proposals for a community school. Both before and since that time great men (philosophers, rulers, religious leaders, educational reformers) have striven for the same ideal. Always there is the attempt to bring the school from its formal isolation into a more practical relationship with the social order. Martin Luther wanted to prepare children to be better citizens of church and state. Rousseau wanted children brought up in natural conditions so that they might recognize the ills of society and create a better social order. Froebel reacted against the formal teaching of his time and began using simple things picked up in the homes and community. The thing that happened to his teaching is pathetic, but so typical that it is worthy of attention. His followers noted the particular things he used with children, but not the idea that the things used must be things common in the homes and communities where the children lived. So the Froebelian gifts for kindergarten were formalized, and school supply companies made money selling them, thus perpetuating and intensifying the reliance on materials and procedures absolutely foreign to the communities in which they were used. Froebel would have been the first to condemn these formalized gifts. The same kind of formalism tends to overtake many attempts to relate school and community. Some years ago the principal of a school in Alabama, somewhat on the progressive side, found a morning