ABSTRACT
Radical approaches to the education of adult members of the British working class have shown time and time again that those whom education has judged to be educational failures are, indeed, no such thing. Community education brings to us the possibility that bourgeois struggle over rights to definition can once again be a major item on the agenda for educational debate. The staff of our community school in Derbyshire was not particularly fluent in its explanation of community education, and consequently it was no difficult task to reveal the lack of impact community education was making, even on its own terms, in that school. The analysis of education, as offered by many community education writers, attempts to operate in a political vacuum with no sense of the historical. In Bradford, the Local Education Authority sought to discipline one of its Headteachers for writing an article in a right wing journal without having sought to discuss it prior to its publication.
