Abstract:

Education systems in the whole Europe are developing in the direction of increasing autonomy of schools. Relatively autonomous schools are able to develop according to national standards. To some extent they can choose their own sources and methods, define needs and implement development plans, decide on the organizational structures or choose partners. At the same time education complexity increases in the local and global context, causing new threats for schools, which cannot be solved without cooperation with parents and local communities. Cooperation with pupils' home and local community is becoming sine qua non condition of teachers' wellbeing. They are no longer able to be intermediary for transmission and verifying increasing amount of information.

Cooperation of schools and communities brings benefits for both. On the one hand schools can take different educational, cultural, social, caring activities for the local community directed on the satisfying its basic social-cultural needs. Schools have also important role to act in activating civil society and binding resources in local community, revitalizing and focusing social forces on educational tasks. On the other hand communities may become source of support for schools as suppliers of financial, organisational and material means. But, more importantly, they may become co-authors of educational goods, engaged actively in creation of social and human capital. In this context education is seen as formal as well as informal, permanent process, realized on the basis of cooperation between different public and non-public entities in the local and regional environment.

Cooperation of schools with institutions from their environment contributes to increase of social capital (through building of networks of the horizontal ties), which importance for development of society is underlined by many authors.
In my presentation I will show the results of recent research project on the institutional environment of polish schools, conducted in 2011. They show very weak dynamics of cooperation. From the quantitative point of view, there are many external local institutions with whom polish schools interact. But at the same time, they are the same entities for many years, mainly public ones, for whom schools constitute an area of their core activity. Contacts between schools and those institutions were initiated long ago, often before our interviewees-principals started to work in their schools. Different public institutions, like cultural ones, other schools, police, local authorities, social services, etc. constitute majority of school partners, NGOs and business appear much more seldom. Schools include theirs partners in the tasks which are of less importance. There are much fewer examples of common educational projects, then those related to exchange of goods, services or knowledge (purchase of equipment, organization of the excursions, organization of community events, which is often limited to making the school equipment or site accessible for other local institutions). Thus “cooperation” in that sense means rather exchange of goods, services or knowledge, that planning common projects. Actions taken by the schools are taken ad hoc, there is no planning together with representatives of local community. The cooperation of schools with local community does not fulfill criteria to call it community education.

Keywords:

Local community, community education, cooperation.