As a result of a questionnaire, a group of 10 Hillside women met weekly during April and May 1961. The women indicated they were most interested in a clothing workshop. The program was initiated, but attendance was sporadic. The women who were faithful in attending did accomplish what they set out to do. One was very enthusiastic and finished several garments. She had never sewn before, so it was a real accomplishment for her. The group later had units on nutrition, meal planning, shopping, and food preparation. Classes continued until June 1962. Attendance continued to be small despite efforts to interest more people by sending out flyers, making personal visits, and establishing a nursery to care for young children. In evaluating the program, it was found that women who attended benefited greatly. The greatest problem is to motivate them to attend classes. The plan now is for recruitment to be done by the welfare department. Classes will be conducted 1 day a week over a 6-month period by extension personnel with the assistance of several certified home management aids. The home management aids have been trained by the home agents. APPENDIX COOPERATIVE EXTENSION WORK IN AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS, LITTLE ROCK, ARK., APRIL 1963 SUGGESTIONS BY EXTENSION SPECIALISTS FOR WORK IN HOUSING PROJECTS Housing 1. Check house plans for livability. 2. Check kitchens for arrangement, working surface, and storage allowed. 3. Check other storage facilities for design and maximum use of available space. 4. Make suggestions for improvements in the three areas listed above, if needed. Home management Teach classes in: 1. How to get the most for your money when you shop. This would be a series of lessons. 2. Management of time and energy. This could include taking care of the house and equipment and overall management. Home furnishings Teach classes in: Foods 1. Inexpensive ways to add color to the home. 2. Arranging furniture for comfort and convenience. 4. Decorating on a budget. 5. Home furnishings problems and how to solve them. 6. Retying springs for sofa and chair cushions. 7. Refinishing picture frames. 8. Framing and hanging pictures. 9. Selecting furniture and accessories for the home. 10. Window treatments. 11. Slipcovering furniture for easy care. 12. Selection, care, use, and coordination of table furnishings. Teach lessons on: 1. Food for health and fitness-kinds and amounts of foods needed. 2. Buying food for a good diet (kinds of foods that should be included). Foods-Continued Teach lessons on-Continued 3. Selection, storage, and use of food-this would be on how to buy, best way to store, and some simple demonstrations on use. 4. How to vary everyday food-such as ways to use ground meat, vegetables, etc. 5. Simple nutritious meals. Clothing Teach classes in: 1. Consumer buying of clothing. 2. Fabrics, finishes, and care. 3. Personal appearance and grooming. 4. Clothing construction-simplified, advanced, and tailoring (would also include pattern selection and alteration). Crafts With shorter workweeks and more people retiring, an increased number of people are interested in hobbies and crafts. It would be very good to include a hobby room, recreation room, or a workshop in the housing plans to meet the needs of families today. Surroundings 1. Pride in surroundings could be demonstrated by the use of "handmade" lawn equipment, bird feeders, walkways, fences, barbecue grills, gardens, rock gardens, retaining walls, gates, wind bells, pottery, yard partitions, etc. 2. Check the plans submitted by the landscaping architects. As most of these architects are located out of the State, many of the materials recommended may not be best suited for this area. Health Teach lessons on: 1. Sanitation in the home. 2. The importance of proper health habits and practices for every member of the family. 3. Preventing illness through immunization. 4. Proper home care of the teeth. 5. Recognizing early symptoms of disease-when to see a doctor, 20 danger signals of disease. 6. Your family doctor and dentist. 7. Exercise and health. 8. Understanding mental illness-promoting good mental health in the family. 9. Sick animals that threaten your health. 10. Physical, emotional, and nutritional health of children from 1 to 6, 6 to 12, the adolescent. 11. Planning for the aging years. 12. Home care for the sick. 13. What to place in the home emergency medicine cabinet. 14. Home safety, child safety, safety begins inside a man. Equipment and lighting Teach classes in: 1. The vacuum cleaner and its uses. 6. Selection of pots and pans. 7. Buying household equipment. 8. Buying small electrical appliances. 9. Selection of floor polishers. 10. Selection of ranges. 11. Lamps and lighting for the living room. Youth In a housing development there might be three or four different 4-H Clubs. They might be in different areas within the housing development or they might be according to age groups covering the whole area. For example, there might be a junior club made up primarily of 10 and 11 year olds, another club made up primarily of 12 and 13 year olds, and then a senior club of 14 year old and older youngsters. If a housing development does not have a community building in which the clubs might meet, the clubs should be small. They should not be larger than about 15 to 20 members so they could meet in the living rooms of the homes. If there is a community building, the clubs could possibly be as large as 25 or 30 and still not be too large for lay leadership to handle. The minimum leadership of a club is a lay person as the organization leader and two lay people as project leaders. Some clubs, where leadership is readily available, may have as many as six or eight leaders, all of whom have specific roles. Child development Teach classes in: 1. Caring for small children. 2. Play equipment. CHAPTER VIII CONTINUING EDUCATION AND THE AMERICAN SOCIETY LOOKING AHEAD There are many clues to the future role of adult education in American society. Business and industry and diverse sorts of organizations and groups have made education a part of their operations. Increasing numbers of people have been participating in available adult education opportunities. Many institutions have created a permanent place for adult education in their operations. Cumulative evidence points an essential place for adult education in the self-renewal of individuals and the society. Continuing education-that is, education which is a continuous. phase of living-has long since been a reality with large segments of the populaton. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, social workers, scientists, mathematicians, and many others testify that one of their major concerns is keeping up with their professions. Sometimes these individuals have had to learn more since graduation than it was possible to learn during their profesional education. This new learning has been concerned with acquiring new skills and using new instruments, absorbing and applying new ideas, and at times, understanding newly substantiated basic principles which have contravened much that was learned before. Such is the character of the world today where the acceleration of knowledge has reached explosive proportions. Wilbur J. Hallenbeck, in the book entitled "Adult Education Outlines of an Emerging Field of University Study," draws the conclusion that: When the recognition of this has become general and adults have come to expect to keep on learning throughout life, adult education will have become continuing education, as it well must if it is to meet the demands of the technological revolution which is upon us. It seems clear that we are rapidly moving toward the time when practically all workers will be going to school as part of their job or as a part of their advancing general education. There seems to be very little question that proliferation of adult education, especially in American industry, is the birth of an educational force of farreaching consequences which is adapting civilization to a new technological era, the ultimate consequences of which stagger the imagination. Edward W. Brice, Director of the Adult Education Branch, U.S. Office of Education, puts it another way: The role of adult education in society is to become lifelong or continuous education in fact as well as theory, so that all individuals take it for granted that education is a continuous part, not only of the responsibilty of living, but also the mainspring of self-renewal. UNFINISHED BUSINESS The new frontiers of adult education projected above may seem, in the light of present practices, visionary. But the facts are that in the United States we are entering a historic period which can only be characterized as a "learning society" where even our survival as a great nation will depend upon our ability to continue to learn and grow throughout our entire lifespan. Alfred North Whitehead predicted this phenomenon in 1931 with these words: Our sociological theories, our political philosophy, our practical maxims of business, our political economy, and our doctrines of education, are derived from an unbroken tradition of great thinkers or of practical examples, from the age of Plato in the fifth century before Christ, to the end of the last century. The whole of this tradition is warped by the vicious assumption that each generation will live substantially amid the conditions governing the lives of its fathers and will transmit those conditions to mold with equal force the lives of its children. We are living in the first period of human history for which this assumption is false ***. The note of recurrence dominates the wisdom of the past, and still persists in many forms even where, explicitly, the fallacy of its modern application is admitted. The point is that in the past the timespan of important change was considerably longer than that of a single human life. Thus mankind was trained to adapt itself to fixed conditions. But today this timespan is considerably shorter than that of human life, and accordingly our training must prepare individuals to face a novelty of conditions. Margaret Mead, in the following passage reaffirmed what Whitehead had predicted: Within the lifetime of 10-year-olds, the world has entered a new age, and already, before they enter the sixth grade, the atomic age has been followed by the age of the hydrogen bomb ***. Teachers who never heard a radio until they were grown have to cope with children who have never known a world without television. Teachers who struggled in their childhood with a buttonhook find it difficult to describe a buttonhook to a child brought up among zippers * * *. From the most all-embracing world image to the smallest detail of daily life the world has changed at a rate which makes the 5-year-old generations further apart than world generations or even scores of generations were in our recent past, than people separated by several centuries were in the remote past. The children whom we bear and rear and teach are not only unknown to us and unlike any children there have been in the world before, but also their degree of unlikeness, itself, alters from year to year. Malcolm Knowles has indicated that the acceleration of change and the knowledge explosion require some new assumptions about education for children and youth. 1. The purpose of education for the young must shift from focusing primarily on the transmission of knowledge to the development of the capacity to learn. 2. The curriculum of education for the young must shift from subject-mastery basis of organization to a learning-skill basis of organization. 3. The role of the teacher must be redefined from "one who primarily transmits knowledge to one who primarily helps students to inquire." 4. A new set of criteria must be applied to determine the readiness of youth to leave full-time schooling. We must constantly ask: Has the student mastered the tools of learning? Can he think symbolically? Can he ask intelligent and mean |