THE clue to the use of community resources lies in the connotation and denotation the term has for the user. With that thought in mind, the reviewers sought to synthesize the findings of selected research, the central ideas of scholarly studies, and the emphases in current reports of action research and educational undertakings in such a way as to throw light upon the educational values and challenge of community resources. Defining Community ResourcesThere was a time when the accepted, acceptable, and understood meaning of the term community was a place-a geographical location with fairly well-defined boundaries-where people lived together and reared their families with the feeling of some degree of permanence. Communication thru manifold face-to-face relationships, mutual interests and aspirations, and common necessities bound them together. The community, if it were a "good" community, according to the late J. K. Hart (28), had integration or integrity, form or organization, a real content of culture and creative life, a boundary or limitations, a sense of direction: It was going somewhere. A man identified himself with the community; he knew where he was from.Today, with the industrial revolution an accomplished fact and the revolution of consumption well under way, the matrix of community feeling has changed. A man may identify himself with, and serve, many communities (56) ; or, amenable to no form of social control, he may serve none (71).Several writers (11,65,69) have viewed the decline of small communities with regret and at the same time have pinned their faith on the renascence of small communities. Whether it be "Melby's dream" or Clark's conviction that schools can raise the level of living in the community, the faith has been sufficient to enlist the financial aid of great foundations to prove the faith and point direction. The focus of experimentation has been on some one of the aspects that characterized the vigorous small community; for example, on the basic essentials such as food, shelter, and clothing (65, 76) ; or on the cooperative efforts of the people themselves thru fact-finding research, discussion, decision, and action (26,68,75). Current Interpretations of CommunityFrom the identification of a community with a specific geographical locality, the emphasis has swung now to people. A community is people.
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