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PATTERNS OF WORKERS’ EDUCATION

with people not exactly like themselves; it must assist them to learn how to
work with others towards some common objective.’

In their educational work, settlements have had to meet adult indifference,
language difficulties, and neighborhood mobility. After studying their own
situation, particular centers have endorsed informal, functional workers’ edu-
cation; others a more formal, intellectual process. Some institutions have
sponsored both types. The Henry Street Settlement in New York City
illustrates how complete workers’ education can be within a community
agency, cooperating with the government. A center is operated in spring,
summer, and fall sessions. Prior to the midsummer of 1935 the center was
a city-wide W.P.A. project, known as the New York City School for Workers,
and was open mainly to trade unionists. The realization that organized
workers have their own classes turned the school into a neighborhood unit,
attracting mothers, fathers, and children of the section. A school bulletin
defines the purpose of study as follows:

Like the public night schools, the courses draw in many who have had little
or no formal schooling; like them they cover cultural subjects, but in these and
in the courses on current events, in economics and social problems, the distinc-
tion lies in relating classwork closely to their daily lives as workers and
citizens. It is a training center in clear thinking for young people who without
acquaintance with history or economics face the responsibilities and issues of
life and labor in a great industrial community. The school is not committed
to any dogma or theory, is modern in its emphasis on self-expression, and
conducts its teaching in the spirit of impartial inquiry and freedom for
discussion.”

Interests awakened through courses lead to informal educational activities,
centered around community reconstruction. For example, an East Side Forum
Unit has been formed. The group cooperates with the Federation of East
Side Clubs, the East Side Tenants’ Union, and the Civic Education Association,
in sponsoring rallies of social clubs, housing meetings, and political forums.
W.P.A. teachers, residents of the settlement, and volunteers guide the program.

Other settlements throughout the country prefer informal, functional edu-
cation to the formal type. Local consumer, labor, tenant, parent and political
groups thereby may define their problems and then proceed to cooperative,
legislative and other practical activity to remedy them. For example, Mothers’

® Gaynell Hawkins, op. cit., passim.
* Henry Street Settlement, Bulletin, New York City, August, 1935, p. 3.

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