ABSTRACT
Major definitions of communities and their components open the seventh chapter, with special attention assigned to the conservative nature of communities, especially traditional communities. Then, potential forms of community involvement in education are analyzed and the importance of local culture-designed reforms is highlighted. More specifically, this chapter analyzes community-oriented schooling and education that are assumed to make school more relevant to local students and communities in terms of educational goals, curriculum, educational leadership, teaching, and schooling. Reforms that meet the needs of the local community and are compatible with its major values and norms are more likely to succeed than alien reforms that are externally borrowed from other countries. Thus, principals, teachers, local policymakers, community leaders, and parents have to consider the perspectives and knowledge yielded in the proposed reform and become engaged in reconstructing externally initiated reforms or initiating their own local reform based on local traditional knowledge and culture.
