The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular governmentFollett, Mary Parker
Science
The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular government
Follett, Mary Parker
Democracy; Political participation; Social psychology; State, The
3. By learning together—through lectures, classes, clubs; by sharing one
another’s experience through social intercourse; by learning forms of
community art expression; in short by leading an actual community life.
4. By taking more and more responsibility for the life of the
neighborhood.
5. By establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and
city, state and national governments.
The most deliberate and conscious movement for neighborhood organization
is the Community Centre movement. This is a movement to mobilize
community forces and to get these forces expressed in our social and
political life. Each community, it is becoming recognized, has its own
desires, its own gifts, its own inherent powers to bring to the life of
the whole city. But these inner forces must be freed and utilized for
public ends. The Community Centre movement is a movement to release the
potential values of neighborhood life, to find a channel for them to
flow in, to help people find and organize their own resources. It is to
provide a means for the self-realization of neighborhoods. In
considering, therefore, the various methods of neighborhood integration,
it must be remembered that many of these methods are being already
actualized in Community Centres, School Centres, Neighborhood
Associations—there are many names for the many forms in which this vital
need is finding expression.
Schoolhouses are being opened all over the country for neighborhood use.
In the larger cities, indeed, where school buildings have auditoriums,
gymnasiums, cooking-rooms, sewing-rooms etc., the School Centre is for
many reasons the best form of community organization. In some cities, as
in Chicago, the field-houses in the parks are used as community centres,
in addition to the schoolhouses. In many smaller towns or villages,
where field-houses are unknown and the schoolhouses unsuitable (although
often we find valuable if not showy results in the little red
schoolhouse at the cross-roads or in a Kansas cyclone cellar underneath
the district school), “community buildings” are being built. Their name
is significant. They have a reading room, library, rest room, club rooms
and usually a small hall with stage for dramatic and musical
entertainments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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