The Community Course
Part 3 - Specific Community Interests
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20. Social and Cultural Aspects of Community Life

Complex Nature of Community
The life of a community is not sharply divided into separate parts, such as business, education, religion, and leisure. It is a single, complex, interwoven fabric, with every part related to and affecting every other part. This total fabric is the culture of the community. Some elements of this total pattern are so clearly distinguishable or are so in need of attention, that we give them separate treatment. Other elements are so interwoven that separate treatment, even for practical convenience, seems to interfere with our seeing the pattern as a whole,

This chapter is devoted to discussion of some elements of community life which for the sake of convenience are treated in relation to each other. This manner of treatment is arbitrary and only for convenience, for it is obvious that subjects treated separately in this syllabus, such as economics, recreation, and health, are no less interwoven in the total fabric of community culture.

Interest in community development should not be confined to a few chief issues, even if they include the important interests of business, education, the church, health, and recreation. A good community will give friendly welcome to every kind of activity and interest which adds to the quality of living. How to give such friendly welcome without scattering and dissipating time, energy, and resources, so that people are wearing themselves out with activities and doing everything superficially - that is a problem in community leadership.

An uncrowded life, in which there is time for relaxation and refreshment, is no less necessary than range of interests. The two are not necessarily in conflict. No small part of so called cultural activity in both large and small communities is essentially trivial, having almost no value except that it brings people together and helps time to pass. Social life for sheer relaxation is desirable to the extent that it is necessary, but to make passing the time away a chief end of leisure implies mental and spiritual bankruptcy. The elimination of triviality will go far toward providing time and resources for a wide range of interests.

The Principle of Economy of Experience
“We must avoid . . . the notion that vocations are distributed in an exclusive way, one and only one to each person…Each individual has of necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be intelligently effective. . . . No one is just an artist and nothing else, and insofar as one approximates that condition he is so much the less developed human being; he is a kind of monstrosity." (Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 3~8).

We crave many kinds of satisfactions, and often these seem to demand many divergent activities. We want reasonable income, so we do the day's work. We want companionship, so we join social organizations. We crave beauty, so we have parks and music, and buy ornaments and pictures. We need ethical principles and spiritual life, so we associate with churches or other appropriate organizations. We must have exercise, so we play golf or tennis.

If each kind of satisfaction lacks unity with the others and requires a separate undertaking, our lives will be crowded, cumbered, and confused. Too often that condition exists. The popular doctrine of "art for art's sake" may prevail - the idea that art is independent of all other values, that it has nothing to do with ethics or with usefulness. As a result, the artistic expression of the community may ignore and tend to nullify efforts to develop ethical quality in community life. 

“Business is Business”
In economic life we may find the doctrine that "business is business," indicating that business should be governed by no consideration but the production of profits. Principles of honesty and fair play may be violated, a factory may be dirty, ugly, and surrounded by disorderly piles of materials, and billboard advertisements may mar the landscape and give the streets a cheap and confused appearance. The health of the community may be undermined by poor working conditions, or by selling the public unwholesome products.

Religious Life
Other lacks may appear in the religious life of the community. The church buildings may indicate that a sense of beauty is wanting. Various churches may compete with each other, each overstraining itself to build a larger building and get a larger part of the money of the community. In short, the church may be pursuing its own ends with little regard for other values.

Holistic Health
The physicians of the community may have little interest beyond their particular patients. The psychiatrists may be working with persons whose lives are disturbed and disintegrated by conflicting experiences. The stomach specialist may be trying to cure ulcers that are the outcome of nervous and disordered living, and the heart and nerve specialists may be similarly engaged. The difficulties of their patients may be largely the outcome of a prevailing way of life in the community. Yet the physician may treat them as independent, individual problems, and he or she may also be following the general way of life which contributed to the disturbance or disintegration of normal health.

Multiplicity of Interests
Where such standards of separateness prevail, a person who desires a full and well-rounded life must have a multiplicity of separate interests and experiences, and the various undertakings may tend to defeat each other. Such doctrines as "art for art's sake," "business is business," and "religion is the supreme interest" are in error. Each field of interest should have relation to all the others, and each should support all the others.

If the idea of unity and economy of experience should prevail, then one undertaking might supply several needs, and it would not be necessary to have so many experiences in order that life might be full and well-proportioned. Life would achieve freedom from confusion and complexity, and would have greater unity and poise, and reserves of health and power.

Influence of Art
This idea of unity of experience is important in art as in other fields. Vital art is one of the formative influences of people's lives. We tend uncon­sciously to become like the art we see. The artist therefore is under obligation to be intellectually sound and ethically wholesome. That is not the same as being conventional. The artist may be an ethical pioneer, but he or she must distinguish between pioneering and decadence; between freedom and the expression of his or her own ethical immaturity and crass insensitiveness. Where the artist meets this standard, then his or her artistic experience is also an ethical experience. He or she meets more than one need in one undertaking.

Aesthetic Appeal of Community
Again, the doctrine that "business is business" tends to destroy the wholesomeness and integrity of the community. An ugly sign on a building or in front of a store may bring a merchant financial profit, but it is an offense to the aesthetic sense of the whole community. It makes the entire community a less desirable place to live. For all the business people in a community to make all of their advertising and signs, and the treatment of their own store front and places of business, conform to a well-developed sense of beauty and fitness would be a greater improvement than the founding of an art gallery. Moreover, it need cost very little, and could be an expression of the growing community taste.

A beginning could be made by bringing about the removal of the ugliest and most offensive signs or advertisements. The merchants of the town, instead of each trying to outdo the others in flamboyant signs, which turn a business street into an orgy of ugliness, might unite, and through a committee, with the help of a competent designer, give their business streets a unity and beauty of design and treatment which would be a source of satisfaction to every person who should have business there. The business experience would then be also an aesthetic experience, and it would not be necessary for the business person to leave his or her ugly business surroundings and build an elaborate country place, or buy expensive pictures on the advice of a specialist, in order to have experience with beauty. Making the same experience serve both usefulness and beauty is an illustration of what we mean by "the principle of economy of experience." When such a change does take place people will look back upon the present appearance of our city and village streets as representing an age of crude, insensitive stupidity.

Ethical Responsibility
The doctrine that "business is business” also should give way before a sense of ethical responsibility to the community. The newsstand dealer cannot face the community with self respect while undermining the morals of young people by selling salacious literature. The person of property cannot call for the respect of the community while renting his property for a use harmful to the community. Instead of trying to pass on to others his or her ethical responsibility by promoting the building of a larger church, the merchant might go through his or her stock of merchandise to be  assured that he or she is not selling anything that is essentially harmful or that does not in some way contribute to legitimate human need. He or she would watch the advertising, to insure that he or she makes no unfounded claims and does not excite people to extravagance or wastefulness. He or she would train his salespeople to tell the plain truth about what they sell. In the field of government he or she would realize that democracy is a way of life, not just a device of government, and that it must be slowly learned. He or she therefore would try to educate the staff in democracy by seeking their participation in administration to a gradually increasing degree as their experience should lead them to develop interest, understanding, and responsibility. In the field of health, he or she would not sell injurious products, and would try to provide wholesome working conditions for all employees.

Having in view the need of the community to care for its so called unemployables, such a merchant might endeavor to find a place where some partly disabled person might be of such actual service as to be self-supporting, and therefore more easily self respecting. In that way he or she could carry his or her share of the social load.

By following this principle of "economy of experience," he or she would in the course of the usual work give expression to many fundamental needs and desires. If this principle should come to be followed generally in a community the result would be an increased excellence and unity, both in the community and in the people concerned. There would be less demand for corrective and relief agencies, or for escape devices by which people flee from boredom and sordidness into an unreal world. Business experience would also be ethical experience.

The Economy of Experience
We may summarize the discussion of this "principle of the economy of ex­perience" by observing that our interests in any field should not be judged simply by the standards of that field, as the standard of beauty in art, or profit in business, or religious loyalty in the church. Activity in each field should harmonize with reasonable standards in all other fields. Then an experience I have in one field can satisfy my needs in other fields, and it becomes less necessary for me to multiply experiences. Life can achieve unity and simplicity while it is gaining fullness and good proportion, and can be freed from the confusion and distraction which come from multiplicity of conflicting efforts.

While, therefore, a community will endeavor to give friendly welcome to every kind of activity and interest which will add to the quality of life, wherever possible it will endeavor to express that interest by giving quality to the usual and necessary life of the community, rather than by adding new organizations or institutions or activities which require additional effort and expense.

The principle of economy and unity of experience should run through the whole design of community life, and can be a powerful cultural influence. It will show that the life of the community is not made up of a number of unrelated undertakings and interests, but is a singly, interweaving cultural fabric, in which each part adds to or subtracts from the quality of all the rest.

A Development Process
Achievement of that unity and economy of experience is an art which must be learned as good speech and manners are learned, or as a great orchestra is developed, by long working together with the gradual development of a well understood common purpose. In every community there are elements of waste or ugliness or disharmony to be removed, or opportunity for some achievement of excellence to be pursued, which provide the simple and plain beginnings of that process. Each successful undertaking, however simple and however small, helps develop experience and skill for further effort.

For instance, the Community Council in a California town persuaded the local drug store to discontinue the sale of salacious literature. In another town a lawyer with offices on a second floor used one room for storage, and had a front window piled with unsightly boxes and bales. A suggestion that this window was an eyesore to the community led to its being cleaned up. In another community the lots along the railroad were piled with junk or occupied by tumbledown buildings, so that passengers going through town in the train saw unsightly ugliness. The Chamber of Commerce made a project of clearing up those spaces, turning them into neat gardens, patches of lawn, bits of park, or playgrounds. In some cases unpleasant conditions were removed by orderly arrangement of stock piles. Every community has some immediate and practical opportunities to work for unity and quality, and to give expres­sion to the "principle of the economy of experience."

Community Centers
The Community as a whole can have a much better realization of its existence if it has some place in which, as a community, it can express its common life. Already there are some such community centers - the post office, railroad station, and school - but since each of these serves a very limited purpose it does not take the place of a general community center. Sometimes the school does, however, serve reasonably well as a center of community life. 

Because the American community has been disrupted by the self centered organizations of churches, clubs, lodges, etc., as well as by the flux of modern life, the feeling of community is weak. As that feeling is strengthened and developed, it will be greatly helped by the development of a community home and meeting place. Sometimes the best that can be done is to use the school building. Sometimes a public park, where community meetings, band concerts, etc., may be held, must serve the purpose.

An ideal to work for is a community center, with an auditorium, rooms for smaller meetings, a nursery, game rooms, a place to serve meals, and outside playgrounds. If space and other conditions permit, such a community center might well be the location of most community interests. The post office might well be located there, as well as the public library and the offices of city officials, who would probably be more sensitive to public opinion if they should meet the general public more frequently. Such a community center, either in one suitable building or a group of buildings, where the common life of the community can focus, may go far toward developing a consciousness of the community as such. Even small communities, by planning through the years, may achieve this aim.

Education
The school program of most communities has suffered greatly because of this division of life into separated parts. Children often have a strong sense of the unreality of the school process. The original way by which human beings learned what their elders know was for children to watch adults and imitate them. The more the community can have a common life, the more this fundamental learning process can be recovered. Children may continue to learn facts in schoolrooms but they learn life itself outside.  Well organized community life supplies the best opportunity for that process, and a community center can be a help to that end. It would be desirable to have the community center adjacent to the school center, with such facilities as gymnasium, library, community theater, and perhaps even a general assembly hall, available both to the school and to the community in general. Education has become too much a world by itself, cut off from the life for which it is a preparation, and of which it should be an integral part.

Vocational Education
High school pupils may have vocational courses, often given by teachers who never had any intimate contact with another vocation than teach­ing, and yet the pupils' actual contact with any vocations except teaching may be very slight. In the average small community there is very little intelligent help for young people trying to find their suitable places in life. Either the school or the Community Council would do well to explore the community for possible local careers for young people. If there are young people of special bents who need larger opportunity than the village can afford, it should then be the work of the community to open the way for such persons when their families cannot. It would be well for the Community Council through the years to have a small continuing com­mittee on vocational guidance, a group of persons who would make it a major interest to know the possibilities of many callings, and to become acquainted with every young person in the village for whom finding a vocation is a problem.

Often the problem is not simply that of finding a suitable vocation for a young person, but of making him or her aware of the preparation and the sustained purpose necessary to achieve competence, and of the larger opportunities and issues of the calling. In some Mormon communities the local business people undertake to give each high school senior opportunity to work for a time in a business he or she thinks might interest him. Such a chance for one or more actual working experiences under friendly guidance should be the opportunity of every young person who is trying to settle upon a calling.

Adult Education
It might be maintained that only by adult education does society progress. If each generation teaches the younger generation only what it learned when it was young, we may have an unprogressive cycle. It is by the enlarging of our outlooks and the changing of our points of view after we are mature that we are able to pass on to the next generation a better culture than that we acquired as children.

Adult education is necessary to make leadership effective. Some person in the community may have taken the trouble to inform himself or herself thoroughly on some subject of great public interest, but unless there is some way for him or her to transmit his information, the community may be but little better off for the effort.

Securing Good Teachers
One of the chief aims of adult education is to make it possible for people generally to know things of importance to them which someone has taken the trouble to know about. Nearly every community, even if it is made up of only a few dozen people, has within its reach men and women who are well qualified to inform them on subjects of general interest. To find out who such people are, and to make them available to people who would like to learn what they have mastered - that should be the responsibility of some group in every community.

A Community Council may well have a committee on programs, on the one hand keeping in touch with significant speakers or teachers or leaders who may come within reach, and on the other hand keeping in touch with local organizations needing teachers for classes or speakers for programs. Also, such a committee should undertake to see that interesting or especially well informed persons coming to the community may be heard, when it is appropriate, by the entire community, and not just by a small organization. 

Teaching Democracy
Another aim of adult education is to help people learn the ways of democracy. Good leadership will develop the habit of participation. People do not become democratic by chance any more than they become musicians or carpenters by chance. They must learn the art of democracy, and wise leadership may teach that art in adult education.

Adult Education Literature
Adult education should be education. As the Overstreets remark in their Leadership for Adult Education (page 26), “We seem to find in the land a great weariness with the way in which we have all pooled our manifold ignorance through the discussion method, congratulating ourselves all the while on our democratic tolerance. No doubt a democracy must provide places where people may talk freely whether or not they know what they are talking about. But the job of the adult educator is not primarily to provide such places. His or her job is to create conditions under which people can really learn. . . . To create such conditions the leader must himself or herself possess and enjoy accurate knowledge. . .”

There is coming to be a large literature in this field, covering every phase of the subject from elimination of illiteracy to graduate work in university extension. The American Association for Adult Education has published a volume of 493 pages on The Literature of Adult Education. Here one finds a very large number of references to books and magazine articles, classified under hundreds of different headings, with references to scores of bibliographies concerned with special parts of the field.

In such a maze of material how can a member of a small community who wishes to be of use in the field of adult education find his way? If the prophet Isaiah, when he started out on his adult education program, had come across such a bibliography, he might have quit his prophesying, feeling that he would not be fit to teach until he had read one or two hundred of these books. In such case the world probably never would have heard from him. 

A considerable amount of reading is desirable. Such books as Sanderson’s Leadership for Rural Life, Overstreets' Leaders for Adult Education, and Follett’s The New State, may give one an idea of the spirit and manner in which adult educa­tion can best be carried on. Walsor’s The Art of Conference is also helpful. Then one may as well go to work, doing his or her best. Sometimes there may be opportunity to see a good teacher of adults at work. Sometimes a good book on the subject may be read - there are none too many of them - but one's own experience will be his chief teacher.

With a copy of The Literature of Adult Education as a guide to books and magazine articles that are available, and with a subscription to the Journal of Adult Education, a person may gradually explore his or her way into whatever phase of the subject most concerns him or her. But the chief concern of a teacher should be not with teaching technique, but with such knowledge of his subject and interest in it that he or she has something worth teaching.

Community Libraries
Seldom is a community too small to have a library. A woman in a community of a few dozen families was troubled by the aimless loafing and trouble-making of the children in the neighborhood. So she got a dozen or so children’s books and invited the neighbor children to come. Before long, on rainy days or late afternoons they would be sitting or lying in all available rooms of her house, reading those books.

A well planned investment in Modern Library editions or Home Library Foundation books will furnish a vast amount of good and interesting reading for a community of fifty families. Some person in the community might make it a community service to catalogue and loan the books.

An estimate by the American Library Association in 1936 indicated that 75% of the people of America in farms and in small communities were without library facilities. Yet books more than almost anything else open up the world to inquiring minds. A person without books is almost without windows to his or her small world.

There is little evidence to support the common assumption that reading of itself is of value. People can be just as trivial and inconsequential, and just as decadent, in reading as in doing anything else. Worthwhile reading is but a part of a total cultural process, though a vital part. Boys and girls and men and women as a rule do not "take naturally" to good reading, any more than they naturally have disciplines and skill in any other field. Supplying books is only the first step.

Building Intellectual Interests
Beginning with the actual interest and understanding of people, and gradually building substantial intellectual interests, is a great art. The existing interest may be in chickens or in clothes or in a community cooperative. Whatever that interest may be, there will be a large literature in it. A skillful leader can use that interest to broaden outlooks and to develop an appetite for thorough understanding. 

The aim should be to increase range of outlook and thoroughness of understanding, not just to provide a pleasant way for passing time.  Some small town libraries are so filled with transient and trivial reading that a young person can have not much more hope of enlarging his horizon there than he could by spending as many hours about the stove in the village store. The unutterable flatness, superficiality, and monotony of leisure and recreation, and of intellectual life, in many small American communities will not be self-eliminating. Leadership is essential. 

More and more small communities are not limited to their own resources for library facilities. State libraries, county libraries, bookmobiles and local branch libraries are making books available to many people. Library books are delivered by auto to schools, stores, or filling stations, or are sent by mail directly to the homes. Where it is desired to secure library facilities for a community it is well to correspond with the American Library Association, in Chicago, or with the extension division of the state university, to find out what provisions are made for library service in the small communities of the state.

Where a small library does exist and one wishes to secure books in special fields of study the librarian usually can jet them by interlibrary loans. Thus any book in America which is necessary for serious study is available to any person in touch with a library. 

The Arts and Sciences
In any live community, interest in the arts and sciences will find varied expression. In one community a musical leader may so arouse and develop musical interest that a reputation for being a musical community may develop. In another community a man skilled in furniture design may develop so much interest in furniture and handicraft work that the taste of the community in that respect may be revolutionized. In another case landscape design and gardening may become a fine art, with many members of the community as amateur students.

Sometimes one or a few persons with excellent training and keen interest in science may arouse such interest that young people will enjoy meeting in science clubs or going on outdoor expeditions. Sometimes more general cultural interests prevail and courses of lectures become a leading feature of community life.

There are many cases in the aggregate where small groups with special interests have maintained continuous existence for long periods. There may be sing­ing clubs, art clubs, Browning or Shakespeare clubs, geology clubs, cross-country clubs, or simply discussion clubs. For a young man or woman to find a variety of cultural interests in the community from which a choice of associations can be made, may have much to do with forming his or her life interests. A live organiza­tion will not become ingrown in its associations, but will continually explore the community, including the high school, for persons who can share its interests.

Sometimes such associations have a practical bent. In a small Kentucky com­munity a group of about twenty small farmers began to study grape culture, and met one evening a week for that purpose. The Ohio Farm Bureau has found that the monthly meetings of its small advisory councils for discussion of a wide variety of subjects have been one of its most significant activities.