COMMUNITY EDUCATION AND PREFIGURATIVE SOCIETY

Royal T. Fruehling

Coming by different roads out of the past, all the peoples of the earth are now arriving in the new world community.t

Whoever they are and wherever their particular point of entry may be, all men are equally immi­grants into the new era.2

. . . imperfect attempts to reconstruct the behavior of our forebearers in the remote past when they were becoming men are impeding the successful transformation of our outmoded con­temporary cultures . . , 3

We must create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn, but how to learn and not what to be committed to, but the value of commitment.•

With these words, former anthropologist Margaret Mead describes contemporary humankind as migrants or pioneers through time. As earlier people migrated over the face of the earth and frequently found themselves in places where their former traditions proved to be inadequate, so do we, in the present, find ourselves as migrants accelerated through time to the point where the experience and knowledge of previous generations fail to provide us with models for successfully coping with current challenges. It is a time when the experience and insight of youth often constitute hypotheses as worthy of testing as those of their elders; a time when community education increasingly becomes, for these "migrants," an essential process for life-long learning and communication within and across generations.

Essential to the success of any community educa­tion program are persons who understand the concept of community, who view culture as both a dynamic process and as the adaptive responses of a group of persons, who understand the unique

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demands that increasingly are being made upon our traditional understanding and practice of education and who see people as members of many communities ranging from the local neighborhood to the world as a potential global community.

There appear to be four essential characteristics that define a group of people as a community: (1) They are persons who must share certain pro­blems in common; (2) must share an interest in resolving these problems; (3) must be able to com­municate with each other, either face-to-face or through the use of various media, and (4) must share that sense of community which Butts describes as:

... the feelings of mutual identification and belong­ingness, the sentiments supporting cohesion and solidarity, the commitments or obligations to the welfare of the community . . . s

Education can be described as a process by which individuals involve themselves, at any age and in any situation, in a deliberate, systematic and sustained effort to transmit or acquire knowledge and behavior. The effort to educate may be direct or indirect, the results may be intended or unintended, and the process itself may be consciously examined or uncon­sciously accepted.

Much of the content of the educational effort in any society is cultural and has as its focus those rules or sets of arrangements by which, or with which, the members of that society adapt to both their physical and social environments. This content can be divided further into traditional culture and adaptive culture. The former has its origin in the near or distant past and has been transmitted almost intact from the older to the younger generation; the latter has its origin in the present and consists of the adaptive mechanisms and strategies generated by a society or sub-group in response to a unique crisis in the present or to a con­tinuing challenge for which the traditional culture no longer provides an adequate response. If such adaptations prove to have survival or coping value

they may become part of what will constitute the traditional culture for the next generation.

In Culturt and Commitment, Margaret Mead describes three cultural systems-postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative-and the form of education that characterizes each.11 Postfigurative societies are characterized by change that is slow and almost im­perceptible. A high degree of continuity links together the older and the younger generations. Education consists of children learning, almost entirely from adults, that traditional culture which the adults had learned as children from their elders. Culture is transmitted with the assumption that the way of life of the older generation is/will be un­changing and essentially the same as it has always been and that it should be conveyed to the next generation with unchanging continuity. In such a society, culture is taken for granted by the members and, for the most part, remains unconscious, unartic­ulated, and unanalyzed in practice.

Cofigurative societies usually arise when post­figurative societies face a sudden crisis or catastrophe such as war, population dislocation, immigration, rapid social change, etc., that disrupts the continuity of cultural transmission between the generations. Outside of formal schooling, children and adults learn primarily from their peers. The cofigurative system, where it presently exists, is usually characterized by many of the same assumptions that characterize post­figurative societies. While there is lacking continuity of cultural transmission from generation to genera­tion, the knowledge and behavior transmitted within the adult or youth peer group often retains the characteristics of being unarticulated, unanalyzed, and unquestioned.

Mead suggests that, as the present increasingly becomes characterized by rapid change and as both the younger generation and their elders find them­selves without adequate experience and knowledge for coping with the time in which they live, the child will come to represent what is to come and parents will increasingly learn from their children. The cultural model that will predominate Mead calls the prefigurative model. Here young people will increas­ingly share experiences that none of their elders have had or will have, the present only minimally will be an extension of the past, parents will have few cultural forebearers, any communication between the generations will be a dialogue but will increas­ingly lack a common vocabulary, and the adults will not be able to consult their own childhood to under­stand contemporary youth.

To identify with something and be committed to something that is larger than oneself has become a

major preoccupation of contemporary youth and adults alike. Earlier, much of a person's under­standing of who he/she was and what he/she believed in came from a knowledge of his/her group's past and those persons who peopled it. The continuity between the present and the past that characterized postfigurative societies no longer exists for most persons living in contemporary industrial societies. At the same time, the increasing complexity of most modern societies has made obsolete many of the in­tegrating structures that formerly facilitated communication between persons which, in turn, resulted in their having a greater sense of member­ship, belonging, and the power to effect change in their own community.

A contemporary response has been an increase in programs of ethnic and cultural studies and a search for "roots." Too often, such programs are simply an extension of the postfigurative model. When self­contained in the school or university classroom, culture is viewed by students as something static rather than dynamic; textbooks, curriculum guides and course instructors become reincarnated voices of the elders. Another response has been to join self-contained and socially isolated groups. Here again the model, too often, is a postfigurative one where the participant is expected to defer to the wisdom of authority figures who demand un· questioned obedience. The alternative offered the migrant in time is often only an updated version of the melting pot alternative that was thrust upon an earlier generation of migrants in space. Here, an individual or group claims that a single existing set of behaviors or strategies is superior to all others and that to conform is more acceptable than to search for new alternatives.

Other persons, disenchanted with both their bio­logical and political elders after Vietnam and Water­gate, lost themselves in peer-initiated fads and fashions-cofigurative activities where parents and children are launched on separate and increasingly divergent trajectories. Too often the result is a widened generation gap and a preoccupation with self and privacy that is destructive to communication and community building.

Here in Hawaii, a number of additional forces have served to reinforce the postfigurative and cofigura­tive models for living and learning. Hawaii's population is primarily a population of immigrants from the Pacific, Asia and the Mainland United States- and their children and grandchildren. The flow of immigrants, which began with the search for cheap plantation labor, continues into the present aided by liberalized immigration laws and increased

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numbers of refugees from the political turmoil of Southeast Asia.

There are many families where two or three gener­ations live under the same roof and where extended family members live in close proximity to each other. Very often it is the grandparents of one's own family, or of someone else's family, who serve as sitters for preschool children while their mothers work during the day. Sessions of indiscriminate television viewing often become programs of day care for the young. In all of these, the postfigurative model predominates. The messages transmitted by these elders may no longer be consistent from transmitter to transmitter, as in an earlier time; but, in almost every case, when the child responds or speaks he only speaks to himself or to a peer. The very often limited-English speaking grandmother, the busy working parents, and the tele­vision voice do not hear and do not respond.

College-age people who are often insecure in their own experience and who feel anger over the exploita­tion of an earlier generation of plantation laborers and their own past rejection of them, now come with tape recorders and cameras to record oral histories and collect artifacts. They want to learn. They question; the elders respond. The youth listen and record for prosterity-but there is little dialogue. The elders, of ten overjoyed at being listened to, rarely question their interviewers; and the interviewers, learning about what life was and is for the elders, communicate little or nothing of who they are and what they think.

When youth in Hawaii, as elsewhere, do teach their parents lessons in taste and fashion, the content of such lessons generally originates with another set of elders: those who program the media and whose task it is to increase the demand for and consumption of goods and services.

Such interaction between the generations is inade­quate . There is the failure to consider that the future will be significantly different from the past and not merely an extension of it. The result, more often than not, is the fragmentation of community into closed and often competing groups rather than the reintegration of persons and groups into commu­nity by creating opportunities for dialogues, planning and participation that cut across the generations as well as across the sexes, races, ethnic groups, national groups, et cetera.

Mead argues that neither the maintenance of or a return to the postfigurative model nor an attempt to make the cofigurative model a permanent way of life will prove to be an adequate and adaptive cultural response by adults and youth who find themselves as immigrants in time. Instead, it will

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be the prefigurative model, where children teach their parents, that will increasingly facilitate the kind of intergenerational dialogue that will expose the older generation to the kinds of experience and knowledge necessary for a successful adaptive cul­tural response. This knowledge and experience will only become available as youth directly participate with their elders in social planning.1

Such participation, however, will not come about automatically. Nor have the schools, generally, been instruments for its development. American schools are often criticized as joyless and mindless places where children are drilled in cultural orientations. But this criticism would seem to be valid wherever educational policy and practice is guided by the postfigurative model. The late anthropologist Jules Henry observed that:

The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape Homo sapitns has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, mutilation and even torture to chain them to the cultural pattern. Throughout most of his historic course, Homo sapitns has wanted from his children acquiescense, not originality .... a

Increased freedom from such socio-cultural con­straints alone will not enhance the direct participation of youth in cultural renewal and survival. John Dewey clearly saw that such freedom, as an end in itself, is destructive to the shared cooperative activities by which a community is maintained. For Dewey the alternative to freedom as an end in itself was positive freedom which:

... is power: power to frame purposes, to judge wisely, to evaluate desires by the consequences which will result from acting upon them; power to select and order means to carry chosen aims into operation.9

An initial task, then, is the restructuring of society so there is a reintegration of community; the creation of a renewed context in which shared and cooperative activity is encouraged, sustained, and leads to competent contributions by all persons. It is time to search for alternatives to a society where every person seeks only his/her own salvation whether by religious, materialistic, or humanistic means. A reintegrated community will be charac­terized by persons with shared sets of problems learning to listen and learn from each other. Commu­nity begins with communication followed by cohesion among persons and their overriding commitment to

an increasingly general welfare. Community educa­tion can become one means for providing the content and the process by which reintegration takes place in the family, neighborhood, school, nation, and, perhaps eventually, globally.

The articles that follow suggest some ways to rebuild and reintegrate community to create oppor­tunities for youth to be teachers and advisors to their elders. Other opportunities are present in the student and parent advisory councils that are often mandated as part of federally funded programs. For example, various components of the Emergency School Aid Act (ESAA) currently are being implemented throughout the State of Hawaii and, at the secondary school level, each requires that student and parent advisory councils be formed. Rather than being simply perfunctory creations for the fulfillment of federal guidelines, these councils have the potential for providing the opportunity for dialogue between parents, youth, and educators where, together, they can develop activities and programs to reduce ethnic group isolation and create a more fully integrated community.

There is no one commonly accepted model of com­munity education, but Phillip A. Clark has analyzed seven of the most popular definitions of community education and found five major components that served as common denominators for the seven defi­nitions. These are: an emphasis on learning as a lifelong experience; maximum utilization of the financial, physical, and human resources (regardless of age, level of academic achievement, socioeconomic position, ethnic background, and religious or political convictions); interagency cooperation and coordina­tion; emphasis on the direct involvement of community members; and a focus on improving the quality of living by directly confronting persisting concerns, issues, and the human struggle for a better life.10

In addition to these five components, I would suggest that community reintegration and positive freedom (freedom which is power to ... ) become primary concerns of adults and youth alike as each takes the responsibility for initiating, developing, and implementing programs and activities in commu­nity education. This way continuing opportunities will be created for both youth and adults to have access to each other through dialogues, work and leisure projects, games and sports, community service, and cross-cultural and international exchange programs where together they can then generate, test, and evaluate new alternatives. Community education, regardless of the form it may take, can contribute to a more integrated community

where persons have the freedom to begin to resolve the perplexing problems of neighborhood and world that increasingly will come to characterize the future­come-present.

footnotes

•Margaret Mead. Cullurrand Comm1lmtnt A SluJyoflhr Grnrralion G11p, Garden City, New York: Natural History Press/Doubleday & Co., 1970, p. 72.

2Jbid., p. 56. ' lb1J., p. uiv. 4JbiJ., p. 72. •R. Freeman Butts. "Foundations of Education and the New

Civism," Eslucalional Stud1rs, Fall/Winter 1975, p. 135. •Mead, or. cit., p. 1. 7Jb1d., p. 73. •Jules Henry. Culturt Agamsl Man, New York: Random House,

1963, p. 286. •John Dewey. &prritnrr and Edurnltori, New York: The MacmilLln

Company, 1956, p. 74. 10Phillip A. Clark. "An Analysis of Community Education and !Is

Major Components," Journal of Tmchrr Edurnl1ot1, July-August 1977, pp. 5-8.

Royal T . Frurhlins 1s Assocralr Profrssor of Eolurnllon. Drparlmmt of Edurnlionnl Foundations, Colltt1t of Edurnlfo11, Unit>trsity of Hawaii·Mnr1oa. His Esl.D. is from Slanford Unilltrsily and ht has taughland wrilltn in I ht arras o/ culturt and ptrsonalily, multirultuml tducallon, lht rducalion of childrt11 from povrrly and immigmnt backgrounds, and tducation and social clrangr. Hr 1s Partic1pntory Mrmbtr, Hawaii Crnltr for Adult and Community Eslucalion Drvrlopmrnt.

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