Content area
The thesis I here present is the history of The New School: a community-based school in Barrio Juan Domingo, in Puerto Rico, an educational project that was organized in the 1960's around the need to provide children's religious education. In the 1970's the project had grown to be an alternative after school program dealing with other crucial issues: schooling, housing and health.
The New School movement emerges from one of its programs: the Tutoring Program. It was in that program that youth and parents came together to work for the betterment of their schools, as the Public Schools of the barrio were increasingly failing their children. The New School movement carried on a struggle of more than 5 years to improve the educational offerings in the barrio. In January 8th, 1990 the government recognized the New School as the first community based public school of the Island.
This thesis is part of a debate that occurs within a complex social struggle, on the model of schooling used by the Department of Instruction (DIP) and the effects this has on communities like ours. The public educational system is failing these children who are their major "clientele". I will argue they fail because the school alienates them by systematically denying students and parents participation in the school decision making process.
I trace the development of the New School through the voice of its participants who are sons and daughters of Juan Domingo. This alternate educational praxis was born from the day to day interaction with school children. I discuss four major pedagogical concepts that emerge from that praxis: pedagogy of Vocation, of Human Warmth, of Participation and of Resistance.
The New School brings a new conceptualization of schooling based on the act of humanizing. In order for schools to serve students well they have to include them in all aspects of the process as constructors of their own context of knowledge.
I discuss this new approach to schooling before four pedagogues: Eugenio Maria de Hostos, John Dewey, Celestin Freinet and Paulo Freire. They inform my reflection upon this new approach. With them I present the value of the New School both as one in harmony with the community it serves and as an experience of imagination and construction essential for a true democratic national community.