Community Education - A Sociological Analysis

This study is an examination of the development of community education within the context of the wider social, political and economic framework undertaken from a theoretical perspective which can be broadly termed "humanist Marxism", It attempts to locate the emergence of community education against a background of economic crisis, which signaled the decline of the post-war Keynesian economic and social system, and which expressed itself as a crisis of hegemony. The state's response to this crisis centered around the need to re-assert the mechanisms of class control primarily through the ideology of participation and, more specifically, through the ideology of "community". The concept of hegemony occupies a critical place in this thesis. Adopting very largely the analysis developed by Gramsci, hegemony is viewed as the attempt by dominant classes to universalize their ideology as a way of securing and perpetuating their dominant position. Hegemony is, therefore, a process of class control. The crisis in class control, which became apparent in the 1960's and expressed itself as the “urban crisis", developed as a Result of the strategic weakness of the British economy - the relationship between ideology and material forces is examined in the thesis. Such a crisis, however, is seen as a crisis of hegemony and the state's response to this crisis is characterized by attempts to re-assert the hegemony of dominant classes through a participatory process whereby potentially disaffected groups are encouraged to become involved in established patterns of political and social struggle. Community education, it is argued, represents a changing pattern in educational institutions as part of a generalized ideological change in the practices of the state designed to reestablish hegemonic domination.