Adult Education and Community Development

Abstract

THE interrelationship of adult education and community development is being increasingly recognized. Association of the U. S. A. has made a central point of the place of the local community in adult report of the Association's Committee on Social Philosophy and Direction Finding (89) stated as its number one principle, The focus of adult education is the local community. citizens meeting together in face-to-face groups for the purpose of exchanging knowledge and experience constitutes the sociological nexus of adult education. A similar emphasis characterized the earlier report of a Committee of the American Association for (3). radio program, The People Act, financed by the Fund for of the Ford Foundation, gave wide publicity to the importance of community development. Recognition of this interrelationship has been underway for a long time. Dewey wrote his School and Society in 1899. Lindeman outlined the basic ideas of this interrelationship in Community in 1921 and Meaning of in 1926. While the previous issue of this journal on Adult Education (113) did not contain a section under this heading, it was interwoven in several of the sections of the report. In other recent issues of the REVIEW, Beach (11), Charters (24), and Sumption (121) dealt with phases of the relation between education and the community. material included here is of two types: (a) descriptions and analyses of programs which attempt to identify the significant aspects of the interrelationship, and (b) studies in the various social sciences which offer basic understandings of the interrelationship. In the first type we recognize the limitations of the studies included. We found almost no studies in which there was either widespread quantification of data or rigorous definition of terms. Frequently the studies which we have used were reported by persons who were not primarily research minded, and the purposes which led to the reporting were varied. In the second type we have followed the plan of illustrating kinds of contributions which studies in various fields of social science and in