Word: motte
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...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...
...Mott, who spends little on himself, also donated the land and two main buildings for a two-year community college in Flint. He views the multifaceted Flint program as a pioneering effort designed to be copied by other cities. Some 70,000 educators have already come to Flint to inspect its schools firsthand, and more than 100 other communities have started versions of the Flint program. The University of Michigan even offers an M.A.-level course on the program at its Mott-built Flint branch. The 54 "interns" now in the year-long course get a minimum $5,000 stipend...