In response to a paper calling for the re-engagement of agricultural education with the sciences and science education, this essay is supportive but argues to proceed with caution: one that at first does no harm. I offer a supplementary lens and story of change at Cornell University as a cautionary and motivational tale. I concur with the authors…

In his books "Public Opinion" and "The Phantom Public," Walter Lippmann argued that policy leaders should deny the public a significant role in policymaking. Public opinion, he argued, would inevitably be ill-informed, self-interested and readily manipulated. In "The Public and its Problems," Dewey countered Lippmann…

The concept of community has been central to the discourse of rural education for generations. At the same time, community has been and continues to be a deeply problematic concept. I begin this analysis with Raymond Williams's characterization of the idea of community as a uniquely positive concept, arguing that this framing is, as Williams…

One of the tasks of Jean-Paul Sartre's later work was to consider how an individual could live freely within a free community. This paper examines how Sartre describes the process of group formation and the implications of this discussion for education. The paper begins with his metaphor of a bus queue in order to describe a series. Then, by means…

This essay proposes the theory of normative behavior and presents general discussions of two communities-the online world of virtual communities and the world of feminist booksellers associated with the Women in Print Movement-that can be used as test cases for that theory. (Contains 73 references.) (AEF)

Project Adventure's adventure-based counseling text, "Islands of Healing," uses language and simplistic conceptions of individualism and community to create an ecology of ideas. In this framework, moral and social complexities of modern life are exchanged for an artificial cyberspace-like microworld where unthinking acquiescence to group…