wartime environment of his childhood, and his experience of national service in early
adulthood. Being a good citizen to him means:
“ we should all live and work together and we should respect each others’ views.
... Community to me I suppose is like bees in a beehive, all working together for
a common objective. I’m very much a co-operator both in theory and in practice
and I think that if all of us were to cooperate more then I think that many of the
problems that we face in society would not be there. ”
He feels this spirit of cooperation was a feature of the post-war world he grew up in
and that community has disappeared now in cities.
Gerald’s account of post-war socialisation in the UK echoes that of the New Deal
generation in the USA, which Putnam (2000) claims represented the high water mark
of social capital in that country. Many other interviews evoke the importance of the
cultural ambience that frames formative life periods, and are testimony to the
significance of the ‘period effect’. Certainly, notions of ‘community’ were highly
generational in our sample, with older respondents being more likely to see the ideal
of community in locality and the younger respondents more likely to relate to
communities of interest and lifestyle whether local or distributed.
Regional effects and local contexts are also very significant in our accounts. This is
not just a matter of Euro-sceptic views being rather prevalent in the Tendring area.
Nor is it simply, and predictably, that the sense of ethnic community is more prevalent
and geographic community more elusive for our London respondents while the
opposite applies to those in Cotgrave. More importantly, it is a question of the social
context being central to the way in which learning has its effects on the values and
identities of individuals. This was vividly illustrated in the case of Digby.
Digby is a former miner now working as a site manager for a Fresh Start school. He
was brought up in a working-class Labour family in the North East, with six siblings,
and had no choice, he says, but to go down the pit when leaving school at 15. He was
a local NUM strike activist during the 1983/4 strike. Like others in the region he
received no strike pay so he became active in setting up food kitchens and in
international fund-raising for strikers’ families in Belgium, Sweden, Minsk and
Detroit. He also set up a small business selling miners’ artefacts to raise money for the
families. After the strike he went back to work above ground at the colliery but was
cold-shouldered by the other miners (from the rival union) and subsequently left the
mine to work in a mental hospital, where he worked his way up to assistant manager.
Various other jobs as professional carer led him finally to his current post as manager
of a Fresh Start school.
Digby has always been active in the community, even apart from his local trade union
work. He became a governor of his daughter’s school because it was on special
measures and in trouble and he wanted to do something about it. He was later made
Chair of Governors and went down to London to petition - successfully - for Fresh
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