Why Community Matters: Connecting Education with Civic Life

7. Conclusion: Taking It Home

Chapter Seven Conclusion Taking It Home [The ecology of education] must now move beyond description to prescription . . . . Prescribing an education that addresses all aspects of a child’s life and deliberately connects formal school with its larger surround will require a grand leap of imagination. Indeed the very way I describe the prospect—“connecting formal school with its surround”— is constricting in that my picture implies a ‘place’ with satellites. That will no longer do. —Theodore Sizer, The Red Pencil The case studies presented in this book are part of what researchers who study the everyday life of communities describe as the “steady, but always changing commitment to study human experience from the ground up, from the point of interacting individuals who, together and alone, make and live the histories that have been handed down from the ghosts of the past.”1 When this is done, when we examine human experiences from the ground up, new ideas are sure to emerge. This book illuminates new ways of thinking about politics and education. At the same time, important , and often forgotten, older traditions reemerge. In my research I found that the ghosts of the past, from places like Hull House and Highlander , are alive in contemporary efforts, like those of the Neighborhood Learning Community. This gives me great hope. It tells me that putting American education back into balance is within our reach. It is possible to view education more expansively, utilizing and connecting the multiple institutions that educate. It is also possible to connect learning in the community with democratic practice. But making this happen on a broader scale will require a longer view and a different kind of politics led by bold citizens and innovative civic institutions.2 127 I have argued throughout that schools are important, but that community must also be a vehicle for civic learning. Community, of course, is also no panacea. Like schools, communities have challenges and many community-based organizations themselves operate within a professionalized, deficit-based model. And yet the cases I studied indicate that communities can provide an essential context for educating for democracy. Lessons Learned It seems evident that the problems of community deterioration, democratic disengagement, and academic underperformance are not being successfully addressed by government policy, schooling, or by other potential mediating institutions, such as colleges, universities, or community -based institutions. It is also apparent that these interrelated issues cannot be addressed by any of these institutions in isolation. Therefore, Ira Harkavy, one of the most articulate voices for what I term the ecology of civic learning, calls for systemic reform and puts forward a challenge for educators and policy makers: A strategy needs to be developed that connects school and school system change to a process of democratic community change and development . The strategy should be directed toward tapping, integrating, mobilizing, and galvanizing the enormous untapped resources of communities , including colleges and universities, for the purpose of improving schooling and community life.3 The foundation for such a strategy is evident in this study, based on an approach that advances the ecology of civic learning. An analysis of Hull House, Highlander Folk School, and the Neighborhood Learning Community (NLC) gives greater meaning to this model, which entails looking at the ways education in the community and civic engagement overlap to educate for democracy. These cases produce ideas and real-world examples on connecting education with civic life. And the lessons learned from the cases in this study include: • Commit to making change over longer periods of time, • Place a deliberate emphasis on comprehensive, relational, and public education, • Make learning relevant to people’s everyday lives, • Recognize the creative powers of diversity through public work, • Utilize the talents and instincts of nonprofessionals, • Foster reciprocal relationships, • Embrace flexibility and trust in the messiness of democracy. 128 Why Community Matters Change Requires Time Robert Halpern has written a history of neighborhood initiatives as responses to poverty and social problems. One conclusion of his study is that most often “reform impulses in America are short-lived.”4 New generations must deal with the unfulfilled promises and tasks of prior generations. As we look at the history of educational responses to social problems, there is an impulse toward the short-term program and solution, not the long-term effort. This is confirmed from my case study research on civic education. Again and again, I found that time is an essential variable for...