Untitled Document

by Francisco Vio Grossi
Regional Secretary, Council of Adult Education of Latin America
(excerpted with permission from Convergence, Volume XIV, No.2, 1981)

Popular education claims to be an alternative educational approach directed toward the promotion of social change, rather than social stability, and toward the organization of certain educational activities. Theses are activities that contribute to liberation from the existing social order and to transformation; not mere social and economic reforms but structural changes that make it possible to overcome the prevailing unjust situation.

Advocates of popular education do not over-emphasize the role of education in the process. Since social transformation is a very complex phenomenon made up of social-economic and political variables, education must be integrated into a more general social effort. The specific task of education is related to the need for the transformation process to be assumed by the people as a ‘historic programme’ which offers the concrete opportunity for them to become the subject of their own lives. To achieve this, the people need to reach new and better levels of collective action, each time more organized, wider and more critical. One of the most relevant efforts is the education of popular groups that are potentially able to act as conscious agents of the process of social change.

Thus, popular education is a tool for developing critical social consciousness among the transformation agents in order to create specific dynamics in the action/reflection relationship. This process may be summarized, for clarification, as following this sequence:

· critique of the existing social reality;
· collective mobilization for social transformation;
· critical review of the action carried out;
· re-planning of future action;
· re-evaluation of the previous diagnosis of social reality.

Characteristics of Popular Education
Popular education is both a theory and a practice of social action that is geared toward development of the capacity for organization, communication and critical reflection on processes and social relationships by the most deprived sectors of the population. It is a collective learning process and is implemented on the basis of a certain commitment to the popular sectors by those who take part. Consequently, popular education is also based on the participation of the popular sectors in the planning and implementation of new actions. These actions are conducted so that people can reach new levels of consciousness through the process of solving actual needs.

In Latin America, popular education has been generally carried out by non-government agencies. Its most relevant characteristics are:

· The starting point is concrete. Popular education works within the actual world of the popular sectors. It starts from the popular culture. However, we know that popular culture has not developed in a social vacuum. It contains important elements of the dominant culture that have been transferred to the people through ‘non-popular’ education (among other means) in a way that exerts ideological control from within. To pay too much respect to the culture of the people may thus lead to the reinforcement of domination rather than to the promotion of liberation. The key to solving this apparent contradiction is to develop a critical ability by which people can detach the liberating forces of their culture from the oppressive ones.

· Popular education is a process of creating knowledge. It has the vocation to be a new educational system for a new and more participative society. Thus, it does not pay as much attention to the transference to the people of existing knowledge as it does to creating the capacity for the generation of new knowledge that may be found in the new order. In this sense, it is an investigative activity.

· Popular education is active. Like any other popular activity, popular education is directed toward action, but not any action. It gives priority to the Greek concept of praxis: the type of action that makes possible the transformation of reality.

· Popular education avoids manipulation. It attempts to be an educational system which is consistent in style with the new order that will arise in the future. This style is dialogical, horizontal and participative in the sense that all those who intervene in the learning process are also engaged in the search for new knowledge.

· Popular education is a collective effort. In most Third World countries, individualism is not only promoted but is even imposed. Solidarity and cooperation-basic pre-requirements for social organizations- are discouraged. Popular education, on the contrary, energetically stresses the need for approaching the learning process, and the subsequent action, in a way that promotes cooperation and common action.

· Popular education is a flexible educational process of lifelong learning that continually adapts to the changing historical and local conditions of the participants.

In Conclusion
Popular education is an adult education activity and, what is more, it is a specific response of adult education to the endeavor of social transformation in Third World countries. Most of the methodologies of popular education are also principles of adult education. The intent of popular education is to detach itself from the educational efforts that are directed to maintaining a social system that has been accused of being unjust and oppressive. Its appeal is for building an alternative educational approach in Third World countries that is more consistent with justice and freedom.