Community schools were a promising reform strategy that gained traction during the Great Depression. The idea of community minded, community centered schooling was rooted in the settlement house work of Jane Adams, which John Dewey argued should be a model for the reconstruction of urban education. You will recall Dewey's 1902 essay, The School as Social Centre, in which he argued that every school should function like a social settlement. In this episode, we look at the development of the Adams Dewey idea as it evolved from school social centers and community centers in the progressive era, to fully functioning community schools in the Depression era. In a subsequent episode, we look at an urban community school at the high watermark of the Great Depression. A bellwether of the social movement toward school social centers was the New York City public schools, where the board of education sponsored thriving so-called wider use programs. Vacation schools, evening elementary schools, public lecture centers, and, and evening recreation centers attracted a cosmopolitan multitude of the city's immigrant working class. Yet the settlement style public school envisioned by Dewey did not originate on a city-wide basis in New York City, but rather in Rochester in upstate New York between 1907 and 1910. >> In Rochester, Edward J Ward, a grassroots progressive, encouraged the development of self-governing adult centers and civic clubs with a premium on free speech and the give and take of the open forum. Notable for their heated debates on politically charged topics, freely chosen by the participants, the Rochester social centers were intentionally organized to cultivate deliberative skills and to educate citizens for effective democratic citizenship. With 18 social centers in operation, Rochester witnessed the first opening of a dental office inside a public school, the use of school houses as art galleries and local health offices, the introduction of motion pictures and the establishment of employment bureaus in the neighborhood libraries of the social centers. The social centers garnered support from diverse civic groups along the political spectrum, including women's clubs, settlement workers, trade unions and socialists and even the Daughters of the American Revolution, the DAR. >> The civic clubs were racially integrated and inclusive of people from all walks of life. For example, one debate paired a Polish washwoman, and the President of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, against a day cleaner, and a college professor. Significantly, the club's political agendas were planned and organized by participants themselves. In an era when administrative progressives were imposing their templates of centralized school governance and expert management of urban schools, Rochester's social centers provided an alternative model of bottom up civic participation and grassroots social action that challenged the growing hegemony of social efficiency schooling. Yet entrenched opposition by business leaders and elite conservative groups to the open examination of social injustices forced curtailment of the civic clubs, and led to the dismissal of Ward and his associates. >> And after Rochester, Ward carried the banner of school social centers to Wisconsin,where he helped to organize social centers in the state's hinterlands. By 1911 a national social center movement was underway, given impetus by the first national conference on social center development, conducted in the fall of 1911. Noted by one observer as follows, quote, it was a conference to be remembered from New York to California, from Texas to North Dakota. Delegates came representing city clubs, boards of education, welfare committees, churches, universities and various associations, for civic and social betterment. A new spirit of enthusiasm, a new hope for the future. A fresh and eager interest in the interchange of ideas and experiences seemed to fill the air, unquote. Between 1911 and 1913, Mary Parker Follett, a Boston social worker, helped organize Boston's social centers along the lines of Ward's Rochester Experiment. City councils identical, identical to Ward's civic clubs were a major component of these centers. Follett was both a theorist and proponent of democratic deliberation. She regarded local neighborhood social centers as wellsprings of democratic living and behavior. >> Hm. Lyda J Hanifan, West Virginia's first State Supervisor of Rural Schools, shared Follett's perspective on the democratizing potential of social centers. Describing the situation of a rural West Virginia school district in 1913, Hanifan coined the term social capital. Which he defined as quote, good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit, unquote. Social centers in the town of Hundred built social capital through school-based community forums, fairs and exhibits, adult education, and public lecture programs, student presentations on community history, and a district school baseball league. Hundred's social capital was civicly oriented. Weekly community meetings progressed in stages, from recreation to a successful campaign to secure better roads in the district. By 1913, 71 cities in 21 states reported having social centers. The Russel Sage Foundation played a pioneering catalytic role in creating a national social center movement. On the foundation's behalf, Clarence A Perry helped popularize social centers through his widely read book, Wider Use of the School Plant, 1913, in 20 pamphlets. Social centers exerted enormous appeal for efficiency-minded administrators and policymakers. Extended use of school buildings ensured that valuable property would not sit idle after the regular school day or school week had ended. Minister progressives noted that social centers promoted not only a more stable social order, but also more humane, healthier, happier one, in their view, social centers prevented, quote, considerable loss of life, unquote. By keeping children off the streets, and out of their mother's kitchens, [LAUGH] providing young men with wholesome divergence, diversions to compete with the local saloon. >> The social center movement preached participatory democracy. But the reality of social center operations often belied the rhetoric of citizen participation. >> Mm-hm. >> Social center development in the cities relied heavily on professional organizers to plan and administer the center's activities. After 1915, the zeitgeist of scientific management in reforming professionalism took firm hold in the social center movement. As the historian Robert Fisher astutely observes, newly established social centers, now using the label of community centers, more and more reflected an ideological shift that subordinated process goals of participatory democracy, self reliance, and community building, to a technical emphasis on increasing the efficiency of social programs and services in the neighborhoods through centralized planning. The community centers would be managed scientifically by professional organizers and social workers. The community center organizer John Collier argued, quote, democracy needs science, and the community movement aims to put science, which means experts, into the people's hands, end quote. Fisher's research shows that developments in New York City epitomize these changes in the theory and practice of social centers. Replicating Edward Ward's Rochester Model, The People's Institute of New York City, headquartered at Cooper Union, pioneered the development of school social centers in New York. The success of the institute's experiments with social centers in two city schools between 1912 and 1914 convinced the city's board of education to take over the institute's work of organizing social centers, now called community centers. >> Mm. >> In 1915, the board created a standing committee on community centers, and appointed a city-wide director for these projects. By 1918, New York was sponsoring 80 community centers. Rather than being the bottom up democratic enterprises Dewey and Ward had envisioned, school community centers were now cogs in the city's social efficiency machinery. >> Mm-hm. By World War I, the school community centers were rapidly distancing themselves from the civic purposes that animated the institutions founded by social progressives like Ward and Mary Parker Follett. The homefront mobilization during the war would accelerate that trend and set the stage for a post-war decade of enormous growth in the community center movement. Developments in the 1920's were marked by the professional control of community centers. And a predominant emphasis on community rec, recreation, which drew millions of citizens to the centers. The point of view that schools might serve larger community purposes than recreation had few adherents in the 1920s. [MUSIC]
