Popular Education

Yesterday I attended a presentation on the situation in Colombia. It was part of a monthly series of popular education events to inform and mobilize people in Montreal – especially youth.  The presentation led me to reflect on what people today understand by “popular education.”  I attend of a lot of events, most of them with a speaker or a film and then questions.  It is not clear to me how this fits into popular education.

First of all, the term includes “popular,” that is to say, “of the people.”  Here we are talking about what has classically been termed the “option for the poor.” By the poor I mean to refer to those who have difficulty meeting their basic human needs. It does not mean those with limited revenue, though in many circumstances they may be poor. The distinction is important in many contexts around the world. Moreover, I have not often seen popular education work well with professionals or with people from the middle class. They have their own interests and their reality is not one that requires the process popular education offers. What can happen however, is that people from this milieu can be brought to recognize that their grasp of reality is very limited and that there is a larger reality that they need to understand and deal with. A good process can lead to stronger solidarity with the poor.  In that sense it is positive to work with those groups using some of the approach of popular education. It needs also to be said that in the current global setting, there are very few people who, at one level or another, are not struggling to meet basic needs, especially if one includes among those needs some participation in social, economic, cultural and political decisions that affect them. More and more people are also finding that meeting their need for adequate food and housing is becoming a challenge especially if they look for healthy food and healthy communities.

Secondly, by popular education we mean education and not information. Much of what goes as education is really the pouring of information into the heads of people with the assumption that, miraculously, that is going to change something in them or the world. Education is a very different process. Education means comprehending, in the original sense, of “grasping,” getting a hold on one`s reality, one’s own reality, being able to name it in a way that gives one a hold on it.

In the tradition of popular education it is assumed, first of all, that the poor can be educated, that they can become the protagonists of their own lives.  This is the meaning of “empowerment:” being able to take hold of one’s reality and transform it.  The process of education is one then of getting hold of the basic process that enables people to meet their own needs and also to get hold of the processes that are preventing that from happening. It is a question of learning “critical analysis,” that is to say learning to understand the structures and processes of power at work in one’s own community – for life or for death and then learning the ways to deal with those structures and processes.

Classically, in popular education, it is assumed that ordinary people, poor people, people who have difficulty meeting their needs have within them the elements necessary to do all that but that a piece of work is needed to bring it out, to articulate it, to put words to it, to name it. Thus an educator is not primarily someone who provides information but one who enables people to reflect on their own reality in a way that they themselves discover ways to name the powers at work there. It is a reality they know already and that they know best. For that reason an educator is primarily a facilitator.
   For background on popular education we need to go back to the classical sources: John Dewey who insisted that education was for everyone and that it was a matter of puting some order into our ideas; the Frankfurt School, a philosophical movement that develooped the concept of critical analysis; and then finally Paulo Freire, who put it all together in a way that defined what popular education means today.