Word: mott
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Slave or Free? One of the founders of General Motors and until recently one of its biggest stockholders (he has given away all but 92,000 shares), Mott funnels his millions through the Mott Foundation (TIME, June 28, 1963), which considers itself the nation's fourth largest foundation (assets fluctuate with market values, but the Ford, Rockefeller and Duke philanthropies are undoubtedly larger). It contributes directly to the school board ($3,477,141 this year)-but only after Mott and his aides study and approve of the board's plans for spending the money...
...concessions boil down to a willingness to conduct any kind of activity in the city's 55 public schools that Mott Foundation officials feel will contribute to "the total education" of the city. In adult courses, that means lessons in everything from breast feeding to small-boat handling, from arithmetic to advanced cake decoration. A Sunday "coffeehouse" lecture series takes up such questions as "Why does love escape us?" and "Am I a slave to circumstance or free?" There are discussions of race relations (Flint is 22% Negro) and such religious questions as "Is God dead...
...schools are also thrown open for family roller skating on Sunday afternoons (plastic skate wheels protect gymnasium floors). There are classes in bowling, bridge, badminton and ballroom dancing. The Mott approach is to use recreation as a lure to coax people into continued learning. "You bring people in for a little knitting class," explains Frank Manley, executive director of Mott Foundation projects. "Then you get a little serious sewing-then you build on that, and first thing you know you've got a terrific home economics course going." All the newer schools have a built-in "community room" open...
...Brother. Mott's money is also spent on efforts to cut down juvenile delinquency; it pays half the salary of the plainclothes detectives who are stationed in every junior and senior high school to spot troublemakers and keep them in line. The foundation supports high school courses for prisoners in the county jail, runs the nation's largest Big Brother agency, in which some 900 men become companions of fatherless kids. A high school course on unwed motherhood progresses, logically, to a course on planned parenthood...
...Mott finances his own head-start program for preschool children, even a children's health center with an annual budget of $1,500,000. "It's not socialized medicine," Mott insists. "A kid just can't get an education if there's something medically wrong with...