THE NEW STATE
Mary Parker Follett                                            

The Neighborhood Group:
Chapter XXIII          
An Integrated Neighborhood

HOW can an active and fruitful neighborhood life be brought into
existence and fostered and nurtured? How can we unclose the sources
within our own midst from which to draw our inspiration?  And then
how can the vision which we learn to see together be actualized? 
How can neighborhoods learn to satisfy their own needs through
their own initiative? In other words how can the force generated by
our neighborhood life become part of our whole civic and national
life?  How can an integrated neighborhood responsibility become a
civic and national responsibility?

  There is no such thing as a neighborhood in its true sense,
something more, that is, than the physical contiguity of people,
until you have a neighborhood consciousness.  Rows of houses, rows
of streets, do not make a neighborhood.  The place bond must give
way to a consciousness of real union.   This neighborhood
consciousness can be evolved in five ways: 

  1. By regular meetings of neighbors for the consideration of
neighborhood and civic problems, not merely sporadic and occasional
meetings for specific objects. 
  2. By a genuine discussion at these regular meetings. 
  3. By learning together - through lectures, classes, clubs; by
sharing one another's experience through social intercourse; by
learning forms of community art expression;  in short by leading an
actual community life. 
  4. By taking more and more responsibility for the life of the
neighborhood. 
  5. By establishing some regular connection between the
neighborhood and city, state and national governments.

  The most deliberate and conscious movement for neighborhood
organization is the Community Centre movement. This is a movement
to mobilize community forces and to get these forces expressed in
our social and political life. Each community, it is becoming
recognized, has its own desires, its own gifts, its own inherent
powers to bring to the life of the whole city.  But these inner
forces most be freed and utilized for public ends. The Community
Centre movement is a movement to release the potential values of
neighborhood life, to find a channel for them to flow in, to help
people find and organize their own resources.  It is to provide a
means for the self-realization of neighborhoods.  In considering,
therefore, the various methods of neighborhood integration, it must
be remembered that many of these methods are being already
actualized in Community Centres, School Centres, Neighborhood
Associations -- there are many names for the many forms in which
this vital need is finding expression.  

  Schoolhouses are being opened all over the country for
neighborhood use.  In the larger cities, indeed, where school
buildings have auditoriums, gymnasiums, cooking-rooms, sewing-rooms
etc., the School Centre is for many reasons the best form of
community organization.  In some cities, as in Chicago, the
field-houses in the parks are used as community centres, in
addition to the school-houses.  In many smaller towns or villages,
where field-houses are unknown and the schoolhouses unsuitable
(although often we find valuable if not showy results in the little
red schoolhouse at the cross-roads or in a Kansas cyclone cellar
underneath the district school), "community buildings" are being
built.  Their name is significant.  They have a reading room,
library, rest room, club rooms and usually a small hall with stage
for dramatic and musical entertainments.  

  And beyond this conscious effort to organize neighborhoods, or
rather to help neighborhoods to organize them-selves, much
spontaneous initiative in both rural and urban communities,
springing from the daily needs of the people, is finding
neighborhood organization to be the result of concerted effort.  
Mothers want to learn more of the care of their homes, men want to
discuss local improvements, young men and women want recreation,
there is a hunger for a wider social intercourse or for some form
of community art expression, music or drama.  Yet whichever of
these motives leads us to the school house or the community
building, the result is always the same -- a closer forging of the
neighborhood bond.  Whoever takes the initiative in organizing the
Community Centre -- a parents' association, a men's civic club, a
mothers' club, a committee of citizens, the city council, the board
of education - the result is always the same, a closer forging of
the community bond.  

  The Community Centre movement has made rapid progress in the last
ten years. All over the country new Centres are springing up
constantly.  That the impulse for their organization is almost as
varied as there are different towns and cities is evidence of their
real need. I have had letters in regard to the organization of
Centres from as widely different sources as the city council of a
western city, girls teaching in rural schools, the mayor of a small
city, and young working men in a big city.  Indeed Centres have
become so much the fashion that one man came to me and said, "We
want a School Centre in our district -- will you help us to get one
- what is a School Centre ?"  

  In the year 1915-16, 463 cities reported over 59,000 occasions in
public school buildings after 6 P.M. in addition to evening school
work [1].

  But School or Community Centres do not exist merely for the
satisfaction of neighborhood needs, for the creating of a community
bond, for the expression of that bond in communal action, -- they
also give the training necessary to bring that activity to its
highest fulfillment.   We all need not merely opportunities to
exercise democracy, but opportunity for a training in democracy. 
We are not going to take any kind of citizen for the new state, we
intend to grow our own citizens.  Through group activities, through
classes and lectures, through university extension, through actual
practice in self government by the management of their own Centres
and the varied activities therein, all, young and old, may prepare
themselves for the new citizenship of the new democracy [2].

     1. Since April, 1917, with the rapidly extending use of the
     schoolhouse as a centre for war services, these numbers have
     probably greatly increased. 
     2. See Appendix, The Training for the New Democracy.
 
  Let us now consider the five ways given above for producing an
integrated and responsible neighborhood. First, the regular
meetings of neighbors in civic clubs. In Boston we have, in
connection with the School Centres, the so-called "East Boston
Town-Meeting," the "Charlestown Commonwealth," etc.  At such
meetings neighborhood needs can be discussed, and the men and women
of those neighborhoods, while getting to know one another and their
local conditions, can be training themselves to function with
government and as government.  The first advantage of such meetings
is their regularity. 

  I am urging _regular_ meetings of small groups of neighbors as a
new method in politics. Neighbors now often meet for one object or
two or three, and then when these are accomplished think that they
need not meet again until there is another definite end to be
gained. But in the meantime there should be the slow building up of
the neighborhood consciousness.  A mass-meeting will never do this. 
But this neighborhood consciousness is far more important than to
get a municipal bath-house for a certain district.  If the bath-
house is considered the chief thing, and no effort made to get the
neighborhood group together again until something else, a
playground for instance, is wanted, this time perhaps not enough
cohesion and concentration of purpose can be obtained to secure the
playground.  The question in neighborhood organization is --  Is
our object to get a new playground or to create methods by which
playgrounds will become part of the neighborhood consciousness,
methods which will above all educate for further concerted effort? 
If neighborhood organization is one among many methods of getting
things, then it is not of great value; if, however, it is going to
bring about a different mental life, if it will give us an open
mind, a flexible mind, a cooperative mind, then it is the greatest
movement of our time.  For our object is not to get certain things,
or to have certain things; our object is to evolve the kind of
life, the way of thinking, within which these specific things will
naturally have place. We shall make no real progress until we can
do this. 

  Bernard Shaw has said of family life that it is often cut off
equally from the blessings of society and the blessings of
solitude.  We must see that our neighborhood associations are so
organized that we do get the advantages of society. 

  The second way of creating an integrated neighborhood is by
learning and practicing a genuine discussion, that is, a discussion
which shall evolve a true collective purpose and bring the group
will of the neighborhood to bear directly on city problems.    When
I speak of discussion I mean always the kind of discussion which is
called out by a genuine group.  The group idea, not the crowd idea,
is to come from discussion.  What is the remedy for a "ruthless
majority"?  What is the remedy for an "arrogant minority"?   Group
discussion.   Group discussion will diminish suggestion as a social
force and give place to interpermeation. 

  When we advocate discussion as a political method, we are not
advocating the extension of a method already in use.  There is
little discussion to-day. Talk to air our grievances or as a
steam-valve for the hot-headed, the avowed intention sometimes in
the organization of so-called "discussion" societies, is not
discussion.  People often speak of "self-expression" as if it were
a letting off of steam, as if there were something inside us that
must be let out before it explodes.  But this is not the use to
which we must put the powers of self-expression; we must release
these powers not to be wasted through a safety valve, but to be
used constructively for the good of society.  To change the
metaphor, we must not make a petty effort to stem a stream which
cannot and should not be stemmed but helped to direct itself.

  Do we have discussion in debating societies?  Never. Their
influence is pernicious and they should be abolished in colleges,
schools, settlements, Young Men's Christian Associations, or
wherever found.  In these societies the men as a rule take either
side of the question allotted to them, but even if they choose
their side the process of the debate is the same.  The object is
always to win, it is never to discover the truth.  This is
excellent training for our present party politics.  It is wretched
preparation for the kind of politics we wish to see in America,
because there is no attempt to think together.  Someone to whom I
said this replied, "But each side has to think together."  Not in
the least: they simply pool their information and their arguments,
they don't think together.   They don't even think; that artificial
mental process of maintaining a thesis which is not yours by
conviction is not thinking.  In debating you are always trying to
find the ideas and facts which will support your side; you do not
look dispassionately at all ideas and all facts, and try to make
out just where the truth lies.  You do not try to see what ideas of
your opponent will enrich your own point of view; you are bound to
reject without examination his views, his ideas, almost I might say
his facts.  In a discussion you can be flexible, you can try
experiments, you can grow as the group grows, but in a debate all
this is impossible.  

  One of the great advantages of the forum movement is that here we
are beginning to have discussion [1].

     1. That it is also in many instances leading the way to real
     community organization makes it one of the most valuable
     movements of our time.

  Let us analyze briefly the advantages of discussion. Genuine
discussion is truth-seeking.   First, then, it presses every man to
think clearly and appreciatively and discriminatingly in order to
take his part worthily. What we need above everything else is clear
thinking. This need has been covered over by the demand for
"honest" men, but hardly any one would say to-day, "Give the
management of your city over to a group of the most honest men you
can find."  A group of honest men -- what a disconcerting picture
the phrase calls up!  We want efficient men, thinking men, as well
as honest men. Take care of your thinking and your morals will take
care of themselves -- is a present which would have benefited
certain reform campaigns.  

  The first advantage of discussion then is that it tends to make
us think and to seek accurate information in order to be able to
think and to think clearly.  I belong to a civic conference lunch
club which meets once a month to discuss civic questions. On one
occasion the program committee discovered a few days before the
luncheon that on the question to be considered (a certain bill
before the legislature), we were all of the same opinion, and so
the discussion did not seem likely to be very lively.  But it
happened that our secretary knew some one who was on the other
side, and this woman was therefore invited to be our guest and 
present her point of view to us.  She accepted with pleasure as she
said she felt strongly on the matter.  On the morning of the day of
our meeting, however, she telephoned that she could not come, as
she had just read the bill, thinking it would be wise to do so
before she publicly opposed it, and she found she agreed with it
heartily!

  Moreover, no one question can be adequately discussed without an
understanding of many more.  Remedies for abuses are seldom direct
because every abuse is bound up with our whole political and
economic system. And if discussion induces thinking by the
preparation necessary, it certainly stimulates thinking by the
opposition we meet.  

  But the great advantage of discussion is that thereby we overcome
misunderstanding and conquer prejudice. An Englishman who visited
America last winter said that he had seen in an American newspaper
this advice, "Get acquainted with your neighbor, you might like
him," and was much struck with the difference between the American
and the English way of looking at the matter.  The Englishman, he
said, does not get acquainted with his neighbor for fear he might
like him! I sometimes feel that we refuse to get acquainted with
the arguments of our opponents for fear we might sympathize with
them.

  Genuine discussion, however, will always and should always bring
out difference, but at the same time it teaches us what to do with
difference. The formative process which takes place in discussion
is that unceasing reciprocal adjustment which brings out and gives
form to truth.

  The whole conception of discussion is now changing. Discussion is
to be the sharpest, most effective political tool of the future. 
The value of the town-meeting is not in the fact that every one
goes, but in what every one does when he gets there.  And
discussion will overcome much indifference, much complacency.     
We must remember that most people are not for or against anything;
the first object of getting people together is to make them respond
somehow, to overcome inertia.  To disagree, as well as to agree,
with people brings you closer to them.  I always feel intimate with
my enemies.  It is not opposition but indifference which separates
men.  

  Another advantage of discussion in regular meetings of neighbors
is that men discuss questions there before they come to a political
issue, when there is not the heat of the actual fight and the
desire to win.  

  Through regular meetings then, and a genuine discussion, we help
to forge the neighborhood bond. But this is not enough.  A true
community life should be developed. If the multiplicity and
complexity of interrelations of interests and wants and hopes are
to be brought to the surface to form the substance of politics,
people must come more and more to live their lives together. We are
ignorant: we should form classes and learn together. The farmer in
Virginia goes to the School Centre to learn how to test his seed
corn.  We need social intercourse: we should meet to exchange
experiences and to have a "good time" together.  We need
opportunity for bringing old and young together, parents and
children, for boys and girls to meet in a natural, healthy way. We
need true recreation, not the passive looking at the motion
pictures, not the deadening watching of other people's acting; we
want the real re-creation of active participation.  The leisure
time of men and women is being increased by legislation, by
vocational efficiency, by machinery, and by scientific management. 
One of the most pressing needs of to-day is the constructive use of
leisure.  This need can be largely satisfied in the Neighborhood
Centre.   Festivals, pageants, the celebration of holidays can all
be used as recreation, as a means of self-expression, and of
building up the neighborhood bond.   

  Here too the family realizes that its life is embedded in a
larger life, and the richer that larger life the more the family
gains.  The family learns its duty to other families, and it finds
that its external relations change all its inner life, as the
International League will change fundamentally the internal history
of every nation.   I knew two sisters who were ashamed of their
mother until they could say to their friends, "Mother goes to the
lectures every Saturday night at the School Centre." I know men and
wives who never went out together until they found an extended home
in a School Centre. I know a father, an intelligent policeman, who
never had any real friendship with his four daughters until he
planned dances for them at the School Centre so that they should
not go to the public dance halls.   

  Families often need some means of coming to a common
understanding; they are not always capable by themselves of making
the necessary adjustment of points of view brought from so many
sources as the different family outgoings produce. For example,
food conservation taught in various ways in the Neighborhood Centre
-- by cooking classes for women, by lectures for both men and women
showing the relation of food to the whole present world problem, by
having regular afternoons for meeting with agents from the Health
Department, by comparison between neighbors of the results of the
new feeding -- food conservation, that is, taught as a community
problem, is more effective than taught merely to classes of
mothers.  For if the mother makes dishes the father and children
refuse to eat, the cooking classes she has attended will have no
community value. To give community value to all our apparently
isolated activities is one of the primary objects of neighborhood
organization. 

  The Neighborhood Centre, therefore, instead of separating
families, as sometimes feared, is uniting them. To live their life
in the setting of the broader life is continuously to interpret and
explain one to the other. And if we have learned that sacred as our
family life must always be, the significance of that sacredness is
its power of contributing to the life around us, the life of our
little neighborhood, then we are ready to understand that the
nation too is real, that its tasks are mighty and that those tasks
will not be performed unless every one of us can find
self-expression through the nation's needs. 

  We have seen that the regular meeting of neighbors gives an
external integration of neighborhood life. We have seen that group
discussion begins to forge a real neighborhood bond. We have seen
that a sharing of our daily life -- its cares and burdens, its
pleasures and joys, each with all -- furthers this inner, this
spiritual union which is at last to be the core of a new politics. 
The fourth way of developing the neighborhood bond is by citizens
taking more and more responsibility for the life of their
community. This will mean a moral integration. We are not to dig
down into our life to find our true needs and then demand that
government satisfy those needs -- the satisfaction also must be
found in that fermenting life from which our demands issue.   The
methods of neighborhood responsibility will be discussed in chapter
XXVI. 

  The fifth way of developing the neighborhood group is by
establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and
city, state and national governments. Then shall we have the
political integration of the neighborhood.  This will be discussed
in chapter XXVII, "From Neighborhood to Nation."  Party politics
are organized, "interests" are organized, our citizenship is not
organized.  Our neighborhood life is starving for lack of any real
part in the state.  Give us that part and as inevitably as the wake
follows the ship will neighborhood responsibility follow the
integration of neighborhood and state.
