Excerpt from A Community Center: What It Is and How to Organize It

Sir: To make more valuable to the people those things from which the people are accustomed to derive value has very appropriately been said to be the prime business of legislators. That the schoolhouse, whose value to the people is already great, may become still more valuable to them, is the purpose of the community-organization movement which this bureau has undertaken to foster.

A great democracy like ours, extending over more than three and one-half million square miles of territory and including more than 100, 000, 000 people, must be alive, intelligent, and virtuous in all its parts. Every unit of it must be democratic. The ultimate unit in every State, Territory, and possession of the United States is the school district. Every school district should therefore be a little democracy, and the schoolhouse should be the community capitol. Here the people should meet to discuss among themselves their common interests and to devise methods of helpful cooperation. It should also be the social center of the community, where all the people come together in a neighborly way on terms of democratic equality, learn to know each other, and extend and enrich their community sympathies.

For this purpose the schoolhouse is specially fitted, it is nonsectarian and nonpartisan, the property of no individual, group, or clique, but the common property of all, the one place in every community in which all have equal rights and all are equally at home. The schoolhouse is also made sacred to every family and to the community as a whole by the fact that it is the home of their children and the training place of future citizens. Here all members of the community may appropriately send themselves to school to each other and learn from each other of things pertaining to the life of the local community, the State, the Nation, and the world.

The appropriation of the schoolhouse for community uses has well been called "a master stroke of the new democracy."

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