What is Community Education?

Middle-Class Adult Education

Within the UK education service the most common use of the term “community education” is to describe classes for adults in adult education centres and, less frequently, in colleges of further education. For traditionalists, its defining characteristic is that it is non vocational – not leading to examinations and, in their view, unrelated to preparation for work.

Although initiatives in the 19th century – the mechanics institutes, the workers’ education association (WEA), programmes in university extra-mural departments – aimed to include working-class people, the middle classes invariably took control. Their control of adult education has continued throughout the 20th, and into the 21st, centuries.

However, although students attend in their own time, instead of being sent by employers, it does not follow that the education experience is unrelated to their work.. Valuable contributions of the adult education service in the second half of the twentieth century included classes for women who wished to return to work after caring for young children, and support for people made redundant who wished to explore a new career path.

Because, in recent years, tuition fees for non-vocational adult education have increased, the students are almost all from the middle classes.

Vocational Education

The basis for the establishment’s position on vocational education is described by Professor Eric Robinson (head of Preston Polytechnic, now retired) in the following terms:

The justification of the vocational imperative in further education is that, in contrast with the more able who are free to pursue their personal development in universities, the less able can have educational provision only on condition that it prepares them for work: the more able perhaps need guidance but the less able need direction, in the public interest. The argument is reminiscent of those adduced in parliament 120 years ago to justify the objectives of, and the limitations on, the curriculum to be provided in schools for the children of the working classes. It also resembles the justification of the limitations placed on secondary modern schools when they were created 50 years ago.

This emphasises the persistence of class divisions in the education service. It is also a reminder that, when government ministers state that the purpose of their policies is to increase “choice”, they are not thinking of working-class citizens.

The division between vocational and non vocational education was devised, and is perpetuated, as an administrative convenience: it has never made any sense in terms of educational need. Flower arranging is a frequently quoted example of non vocational education and it may be the case that most students who attend flower arranging classes do so as a leisure pursuit.