This article delineates community education by exploring the wider contexts underlying the field. It associates community education with adult education, popular education, and community development. It reviews the historical bases from radical workers' education to empowering self-help. It depicts the facets of community education arising from these sources, and links praxis – the dynamics of methods and knowledge bases – with critical citizenship and democracy. It provides an overview of the applications of community education, from community building to consciousness raising, and from health education to human rights, to illuminate its scope and use, with examples drawn from the South and North.