Vision for a New Quincy School in Chinatown (en español)

In the late 1960s, the city of Boston began to make plans to construct a new building for the Josiah Quincy School in Chinatown, replacing what was at the time the oldest school building in use in the United States. After initially being left out of the planning process, residents of the Chinatown, Bay Village, and Castle Hill neighborhoods demanded a voice in planning the new school. They created the Quincy School Community Council, which included Chinese American, Latinx, African American, and white representatives from the community. What follows are excerpts from the guidelines that the council created for the new school: 

The new Quincy School Complex should seek to create an atmosphere in which individuals and groups will not feel inhibited if they represent a minority position, point of view, ideology, or culture. Such an atmosphere should go beyond a mere tolerance of the differences among groups and individuals to stimulating a desire to understand and appreciate these differences . . . 

Education must assume the responsibility for counteracting the dehumanizing attitude which implies that anyone who speaks a different tongue or dialect or who displays some regional difference in speech or custom or some racial, ethnic or color difference is inferior . . . 

For the immigrant or recent arrival who speaks a foreign language some effort must be made to insure [sic] that a regular, normal component of the school program include instruction in the child’s native tongue . . .

It is important not only for immigrants, minorities and new arrivals but for society as a whole that the unique distinctions of individuals or groups be preserved rather than snuffed out. ¹

• 1Excerpted from Program Requirements and Design Specifications for the Quincy School Complex by the Quincy School Community Council and the Quincy School Project Staff Planning Office, Tufts-New England Medical Center (September 1969).