Date of Award:

5-1943

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

School of Teacher Education and Leadership

Department name when degree awarded

Education

Committee Chair(s)

E. A. Jacobsen

Committee

E. A. Jacobsen

Abstract

This study is part of a larger project which is still in progress in Box Elder County, Utah. Mr. J. Wesley Norsley, chairman of the Central Sponsoring Committee, makes the following statement of its purpose.

The project described in this report is an educational experiment. It is intended as nothing more. The aggregate of Box Elder County is its laboratory; its people and their resources: the materials.

The experiment issues from realization that democracy, suddenly grown intensely important to Americans, is based in home and family, and that the vitality of this key institution is declining.

The success of the experiment is limited to the capacities of ordinary people, proceeding, in the somewhat slow democratic method of group thinking and group action, from what we are and have already established toward possible accents and procedures in living and learning which will revitalize what we have come to call "The American Way of Life".

We are grateful for the opportunity to pioneer in the field. Pioneers who persist usually develop by their pioneering and gain the first fruits of the undertaking. We can but hope for some successful developments which may be profitably utilized locally and extended to other communities.1

The need and nature of the experiment is described in the following extract from the Box Elder County, Utah Community Program for Home and Family Living, Bulletin #3:

For some time there has been a recognition of the need for communities to coordinate their efforts in planning programs that will contribute to the development of strong, effective family life and happy well-adjusted human beings.

Because they recognized the need, the United States Office of Education sponsored the development of four experimental centers where community programs are being developed, which are called programs in education for home and family life.

The four centers, with their respective state departments of education that are cooperating with the Office of Education, are located in four different regions. Two are rural and two are urban. One is in Witchita, Kansas, which is an urban but highly stable, homogeneous community. Another is in Toledo, Ohio, a large city that is highly industrialized and which has somewhat heterogeneous population. The third center is in Obion County, Tennessee, which represents conditions as they are found in a rural educational unit in the South organized on a county basis. The fourth is in Box Elder County, Utah, which represents the rural, more sparsely settled sections of the West, with a relatively stable and homogeneous population.

The hope of the United States Office of Education is that these four communities, by studying their present educational programs concerned with home and family life and concentrating their efforts to develop more effective programs, will be able to encourage other communities throughout the country to strengthen this important part of their educational work.

Commenting on these programs in a news release from the Office of Education, Dr. J. W. Studebaker, Commissioner of Education, indicated that this was the beginning of a program that is expected to have national significance. Dr. Studebaker said that the developments in each center would be studied, improved, and interpreted to and observed by the people of the United States. Then, drawing upon these localities for information, the Office of Education will prepare publications, pointing out the possibilities and influences of a comprehensive scheme of family life education for adults and young people. We should not neglect anything in the field of education that will tend to improve home conditions and create happier life, since the home is a fundamental institution in our society.2

The experiment seems to be justified according to some of the best thought in the field. The Educational Policies Commission makes the following statement regarding adult education:

The development of a program of adult education is a matter of fundamental policy. The opportunities provided must be as varied as are the social and economic needs and the intellectual interests of the total adult population.3

With regard to family life education the Educational Policies Commission says:

One important responsibility of education therefore is to improve and develop home and family life. Effective discharge of the responsibility requires work with younger children, with adolescents and with adults.4

The fact finding body appointed in 1939 by the Governor of Utah makes this comment:

A long time objective is to provide in every community opportunity for family members of all ages and both sexes to have appropriate and effective homemaking education related to their needs, and coordinated with and planned in relation to opportunities offered through community agencies other than the school and the home.5

The Education faculty of Leland Stanford University makes the following statement:

The most impressive fact is that adult education is an expanding field and will continue increasingly important, in spite of some political opposition and many mistakes on its own part.6

The Educational Policies Commission further makes the following statement regarding adult education:

As thus far developed under federal and state auspices adult education in the public school displays standards of administrative impartiality and local autonomy that promise to keep this channel of communication and inquiry free and wide open. The experiments already undertaken, refined and extended will doubtless form a permanent part of educational duties in the United States.7

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