Question: Good evening, Mr. LaRouche. I've heard so much about you. Alex has told me so much about you. Oh! My name is Calvin;  I'm from New York, but I attend Morgan State University. I'm a sophomore.

My question is based on CBOs, community-based organizations. With your vast knowledge and experience in government, is there a plan or a system that can assure the survival of community-based organizations, who are dedicated to not only the enlightenment of our (quote-unquote) "endangered youth," but the transformation of our youth; not only in our local communities, but amongst our society?

LaRouche: We used to have something that approximated that--on in approximation, in the form of good, local school systems. This idea of community organizations as a self-interest group doesn't function. But, there are certain functions, in which people have interests, which do lie within the province of community activities. For example, education. If you were in a society, not unlike we have now, where people don't care about children--they really don't. They may care about it, as objects, or care about it, in reacting to them as objects, or whatnot; or as pets, eh? I think of marriage as a relationship among two pets, both of whom have a leash on each other for a certain time, until one breaks loose!

So, the key thing is ideas. Take a child: The importance of community, is children. And, you have, particularly, we have fatalities, and we have losses of parents, and so forth, in the community. How is a child cared for? In a healthy community, a child is safe in that community, because everybody's cares about every child in that community. Therefore, everyone takes a kind of parental responsibility of the safety and wellbeing of that child. Because it is a child. And, because they know the child; they know who the parents are, where it comes from, and so forth. So, there's a sense of accountability, in that sense of community. That's healthy.

And, the way you have to do that, in my view, is, you think about the educational system, as the basic element on which to organize community. Because an educational system, essentially, takes the form, immediately, of parental groups, which are raising children, which have--.

For example: Take one of the big crises in the United States, today, is the breakup of the grandparents, parents, and children, in relations to one another. The housing, suburbanism, all of the things; think what's happened to grandparents. You have grandparents who retired, which is a big mistake: Never retire; absolutely, never retire. You should retire your cars, but never yourself. In a normal society, the grandparents have a different attitude toward the children, than the parents do. This is not normal biologically. The grandparents often feel much closer to the grandchildren, in some respect, than the parents do. The parents are less detached. The grandparents tend to be more looking at it, personally. The parents have to take care of the child--all the worries and things that go along with it immediately. This kind of thing.

So, we have a community, in which the older generation in the community, is efficiently tied to the parental-age generation, and the children. That kind of community, is healthy. Take, for example, old people die. People get sick. Families get sick. Remember the family is crucial. How to you take care of it? You say, call in health-care? Call in this kind of thing, to have all these people come in, and take care of this sick member of the family? In a healthy community, the community would share, in a sense, the responsibility of trying to maintain all the members of the community, by a kind of division of labor of responsibility. That is good.

The center of that, I think, is education and ideas. Education around ideas; and social activities, around ideas. And therefore, for me, education is the fundamental function of government, in respect to communities. Health care is also a part of that. But, essentially, the unit, the conscious unit of a relationship, in a community, is essentially the educational function.

And, school must perform that function. They must be in the instrument to bring together the entire community, in cultural activities in terms of educational activities, and in terms of general caring. The teacher of the old days, was that type. A good teacher. A good teacher was a servant of the community, in the sense that all kinds of roles would be played by a good teacher.

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