Theory and practice of popular education
The banking model assumes that knowledge is fixed and that teachers are all-knowing transmitters of that knowledge that gets “deposited” into the empty heads of students, whose identities, experiences, and perceptions of the world are not considered important.
In contrast, the “problem-posing” approach to education acknowledges that all learners can contribute to a collective learning experience, especially if the content is drawn from the struggles in their daily lives. It understands knowledge-making as an ongoing co-creation of understanding the world around us and promotes an analysis of the social conditions that shape our lives.
Freire considered ‘naming the world’ as a prerequisite to ‘changing the world’; through a process of “conscientization”, learners become more aware of the forces that have limited their freedom and they collectively begin to strategize how to challenge power relations and to improve the conditions of their lives.
Popular Education integrates participatory research, community-engaged education, and collective action for social change. It is sometimes known by others names such as liberatory or emancipatory education, anti-oppression education, transformative learning, decolonization; it is closely related to other anti-oppressive practices such as cultural work, community arts, popular communications, activist art and autonomous media. Underlying all popular education is a critical analysis of power relations, and so many practices that challenge specific inequities could be considered streams of popular education: Indigenous or red pedagogy, labour education, feminist pedagogy, anti-racism education, queer pedagogy, critical global education, popular environmental education, and inclusive education.
With this historical and conceptual background, consider these excerpts from José Ramón Matute’s poem and discuss how they reflect the theory and practice of popular education described above.
…to educate all the people without distinction of race and social class
…find a place to create a collective of popular education
…educate the heart
If you meet a peasant, invite him/her to the collective…
My Popular Education Collective (CEP) is small but in it, I both learn and teach..
In this education we both teach and learn, we neither gain nor lose, and what we harvest from this experience is great.
The final stanzas of the poem speak more directly to the popular education collectives as political projects in a new Nicaragua, that not only lowered the illiteracy rate from 52% to 12% during the historic literacy campaign but sees the marginalized peasants and workers as active citizens in a new society.
If we conquer the empire, we will conquer ignorance.
Onward, companions, victory is closer. Today all peasants are learning to read and write.
