Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Home Economics - Challenge of Home Economics [PAGE 22]

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government move in to fill the void. If you belong to the group that is concerned about the encroachment of state and federal government in everyday affairs, is not the first requisite to doing something about the acceptance of the fact that in today's life it is hard to draw a hardand-fast line between home and community responsibility? As someone has expressed it, the wall between home and community is down, and the dust is blowing in something like a gale. Every day the boundary of the community is changing, and each time it reaches o u t The community of my grandmother, born in 1832, did not extend more than a few miles from her home. Today one can cross the entire continent a great deal more easily than she could cross her county. Each time the boundaries of our community move outward, responsibilities move outward too. We should be hiding our heads in the sand if we did not admit that life is vastly more complicated today than it was even at the end of World War I I . The home economist knows the importance of continuing education for family well-being. She has seen how developments in science, almost overnight, have completely changed practices she once accepted. She knows the dangers of terminal education, the inadequacies of college education (even if she is lucky enough to have an M A . or a Ph.D), and she realizes that she must constantly keep in touch with current knowledge. Since she realizes so well the importance of adult education for family well-being, and since family well-being is so closely and inseparably tied to community well being, can we not reasonably look to her to be a leader in establishing adult education for public affairs in her community? It will probably not be easy. Securing an enrollment for a course in ceramics will be much easier. But in the words of Dr. Virginia Gildersleeve, former dean of Barnard College, "There is abiding satisfaction in having fought a good crusade for many a good lost cause." It is commonly said that today woman power is the nation's greatest untapped resource. But woman power needs to be trained to be effective, and training must ever be kept up to date. The home economist can and should push the broad interests of adult education in her community. Nor will such activity bring its rewards only to others, to those she seeks to serve in her community. As Mr. E. C. Lindeman, one of our earliest scholars of adult education, expressed it, "The person who has not yet begun to realize that it is he himself who needs to be reeducated, has not taken the first step in confronting the modern world. . . . It is a joyous enterprise that brings its own rewards."

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