Community Education

Community education is an educational philosophy and a process that expands traditional roles of K–12 education by linking them with community learning. In itself, it is a cooperative entity designed to enrich individuals and groups by engaging residents of particular respective regions that share common interests in developing a range of learning, action, and reflection opportunities. This development is determined by their personal, social, economic, religious, and political lifeworld needs. Subsequently, this educational philosophy underlies community schools, advocating the creation of opportunities for community members—individuals, schools, associations, businesses, and public and private organizations—by forming partnerships among and between those groups to address community needs.

The concept of community education is inherently related to the notion of community itself. Since the late nineteenth century, the use of the term community has been associated with the desire to revive the tighter and more harmonious relationships assumed to exist between people. The first clear sociological definition of community was created, in 1915, by rural sociologist C. J. Galpin, in relation to demarcating countryside communities from nearby trade areas surrounding regional population centers. Drawing from the concept of community, Michigan-based teacher Frank Manley, whose instruction centered on physical education, first promoted community education in the 1930s. He has been generally acknowledged as the founder of the modern community school movement.

In a community, group members share commonalities that distinguish them from members of other groups. This similarity and difference shows that the community is a relational concept: the opposition of one community to others (or social entities). Through community education, then, people enhance their lives and communities through learning and collaboration, and provide opportunities for families, community members, schools, businesses, and other organizations to create partnerships addressing educational and community concerns. The goal thus becomes to improve quality of life and build vitality, hence identifying a community through civic and neighborhood enhancement projects and the operation of community schools. These schools function as learning and meeting centers.

School quality bears a direct relationship to quality of life. Community schools provide more than intellectual training by constructing a potent social force and giving direction for community improvement. Community education is most easily recognized in community schools in their provision of academic, recreation, health, religious, social service, and work preparation programs. Schools in a community may also be a focal point for the provision of neighborhood services. In recent years, this idea has evolved, broadened, and intensified in community schools, in contrast to educative schools with after-hours recreation programs.

Community education has three basic components: lifelong learning, which suggests that gathering knowledge continues throughout life, and which can be provided for by educational opportunities, programs, and services for community members, typically in an intergenerational setting; community involvement, which promotes civic responsibility and provides leadership opportunities for community members; and efficient use of resources, which suggests using a school's and a community's physical, financial, and human resources to address the community's needs, reduce duplication of services, and promote collaborative effort. There are seven basic tenets of community education, namely lifelong learning, self-determination, self-help, leadership development, institutional responsiveness, integrated delivery of services, and decentralization.

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