What is Community Education?
Adult and community education are often said in the same breath but are they the same? Adult education provision in Ireland has a long history that includes the work done not just by the VECs but by the trade unions and other voluntary groups over many years in the last century.
The definition of adult education from the Murphy Report 1973 is the provision and utilisation of facilities whereby those who are no longer participants in the full-time school system may learn whatever they need to learn at any period of their lives
A more recent definition comes from the first and only White Paper on Adult Education 2000 and is defined as systematic learning undertaken by adults who return to learning having concluded initial education or training.
In 1973 the Murphy Report did attempt to describe an adult education that had a critical and difficult role to play in a rapidly changing society if it is to seek to provide information, knowledge, skills and attitude to change which people may need in order to cope with changing conditions of individual, social and communal living.
The Irish Government's first ever White Paper on Adult Education - Learning for Life (DES 2000) advocated a national programme of Adult Education within an overall framework of lifelong learning based on the following priorities:-
Consciousness Raising, Citizenship, Cohesion, Competiveness, Cultural Development, Community Building.
In the case of community education it is a complex concept to define and it is challenging to understand how it works in practice.
