community education
Growing up in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma (the ONLY Broken Arrow in the US), at least for part of my life, I was exposed to a wonderful institution known as Community Education. I took Spanish classes and my brother Gary took Tae Kwon Do.Gary was a happy-go-lucky little couch potato who was turned onto the martial arts at a career day exposition by some karate studio. They sent him home excited with a coupon for a free lesson at their studio. Begrudgingly, my mother took Gary to his free lesson where Gary fell in love with martial arts, but the cost of the lessons were too much for our family’s budget. Not wanting to discourage Gary from pursuing good physical activity, my mother sought out alternatives to the high priced studio and ran across Broken Arrow’s community education and their much more reasonably priced “Wild Bunch” Tae Kwon Do.
It turns out that the Wild Bunch had some of the best martial arts instruction in the state of Oklahoma. Their members routinely took home trophies from tournaments across the state. The instructor was paid a stipend for his instruction but he put it back into the class. He taught for the sheer joy of teaching what he loved and it showed. For the price of a couple weeks at the studio, Gary was learning Tae Kwon Do from the best for a semester at a time. You simply could not beat the price.
My couch potato of a brother took to Tae Kwon Do like a duck takes to water. His grades in school improved significantly. Today he holds multiple degrees (thank you army!). He has captained the Tae Kwon Do team of the US Army and he regularly demos, competes in tournaments, and takes various accolades. He has had offers to do martial arts work for movies. He has the fullest respect of Korea’s foremost dojos (he was stationed there in the army for some time). All this because he had quality exciting instruction in Broken Arrow’s community education.
My community education success story is not nearly as impressive. I have lost a good amount of the Spanish I learned in Broken Arrow, but I have since learned Portuguese, German, and a smattering of many other languages, and I still understand Spanish pretty well even if I cannot fully speak it. I recently purchased an immersion program on CDs and will soon start learning Chinese.
I was often impressed by the choices of courses I had to choose from in Broken Arrow’s simple Community Education program. The choices offered by the Broken Arrow community education program catered well to the needs of the Broken Arrow community. It became the model of what I hope community education in Boone County, Indiana to be. Whatever the education needs of the Boone county residents, whether they be literacy, post secondary, personal enrichment, fun, socializing, or promotion - if the Boone County Learning Network is set up correctly, the educational needs of the community will be met, residents of Boone County will exercise ownership in their BCLN, and the BCLN will flourish.
Community education programs are an asset to the communities they serve. They provide Economic Development programs an incentive to offer potential employers. They offer current employers a vehicle for training their employees. They offer community members a means to come together, explore common interests, and form social circles. They offer school corporations a way to utilize their assets in the off-hours.
States should encourage community education programs and even facilitate the formation of such programs. Perhaps after BCLN has successfully operated for a couple years and can serve as a model for other community programs, we can take our model to the state level and encourage programs to facilitate the implementation of community education programs. A portal through which programs can be administered and operated would help significantly but affordable programs like www.neact.com are available in the meantime. I’ll keep you apprised in the upcoming years of how the BCLN is progressing.
posted by bylaw @ 9:26 PM
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