ABSTRACT
Some adult education theorists and institutional promoters found the unifying principle for adult education in the diffusion of knowledge and culture or in some conception of liberal education. In Educational Resources, Joseph K. Hart devoted only two chapters to education and the other 14 to aspects of community life, but to Hart the community had everything to do with education. Hart titled his chapter on education, ‘The Community as Educator’. To him the community was ‘the true educational institution’ and the school a ‘socially, supplementary institution’. In progressive philosophy and political theory, with which Hart clearly identified and from which he drew his intellectual orientation, democracy and the scientific method were inseparable concepts. In 1919 Hart left Reed College to study the results of the war in American communities and the War Camp Community Service. To realize the democratic community also required a new conception and practice of education.
