ABSTRACT
The topic of community education so moves adult educators that they rarely analyse what it means and usually react strongly because of what it means to them. The dominant view is that community education is both an ‘enemy within’ and a ‘lost cause’; it may be a fresh departure but the voyagers are lost, not to say doomed, and could take the ship down with them. Nobody is entitled just to write a theory; they have first to state what they mean by theory. The technical meaning of theory in the social sciences is the one taken; that there are at least two independent premises from which primary deductions can be made; and then secondary deductions can be made by relating primary deductions. The distinction between action and reaction is largely technical; action is intended to imply innovation and something coming from a need or demand expressed from within, whilst reaction is intended to be a response to change.
