ABSTRACT
In the Community Education Development Centre in Coventry hangs a somewhat battered reminder of one of the antecedents of the community education movement It is a billboard-a once-white poster glued to a piece of wood-which proudly announces the ‘Re-opening of the Evening Continuation Schools’. The date printed in the bottom lefthand corner is July 1910. Those North Americans who visit the Centre, certain that community schools began in Flint, Michigan, just before the Second World War, are taken aback. Danish visitors, with their history of Folk High Schools going back over two hundred years, barely give it a second glance. It is somehow symbolic of the multifarious routes of a movement which is still sometimes described as eclectic by its adherents and as unfocused by its enemies.
