To Popular Education
I made a special connection with Sandra, one of the young brigadistas, as she stepped down from a truck in the central plaza to greet her mother after a 5-month absence. A year later, Sandra took me back to Rama, the rural community where she had lived during the literacy campaign and introduced me to her ‘peasant family’. This reunion helped me to understand the deeper aims of the literacy campaign, the first political project of the Sandinista government, mobilizing the entire country, creating new connections between city and country, and educating everyone about the unjust social conditions that a revolutionary government was committed to change.
The momentum created by a national campaign could not be maintained, but the Ministry of Education proposed a way to continue it but forming popular education collectives in the communities. The new literates became the teachers of their neighbours, both to maintain the literacy skills developed during the campaign, as well as to reach other illiterates. The collectives were seen as community organizations that could move participants from reading and writing to participating in projects to improve their living and working conditions.
From the day of the successful insurrection against the dictatorship of the U.S.-supported Anastasio Somoza, there were efforts to destabilize the revolutionary government, particularly after Ronald Reagan became the U.S. presidency in 1981. The U.S. supported counter-revolutionary military bases in Honduras and other counter-revolutionary forces within Nicaragua. This fit into a pattern of a long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America.
In 1983, in the midst of this contra war, I was contracted by the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) to work with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education to organize a conference on “Popular Education for Peace.” The strategy was to bring together key educators from around the Americas (north and south) to honour and reflect upon the historical educational innovations in Nicaragua, in the context of a broader movement of what is called “educación popular” or “popular education” in Latin America. Co-sponsoring organizations included the Highlander Research and Education Center in the United States and the Latin American Council of Adult Education. The most respected keynote speaker was Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose method I had studied in Peru in the 1970s for my doctoral thesis. While many awaited some heavy theoretical presentation from Freire, he spoke passionately to the new confidence, hope and commitment that he felt from the Nicaraguan people, recently liberated from decades of a repressive dictatorship.
The poem in Caminemos, written by José Ramón Matute, a new literate and coordinator of a popular education collective in Nueva Segovia (a Nicaraguan state on the northern border with Honduras) exudes this feeling and offers some clues to an alternative vision of education known as popular education. The word “popular” doesn’t connote the mainstream notion of what’s hip or popular, but rather refers to “the people”, the popular sectors that have been most marginalized by unjust social systems. Let’s lay the ground for understanding this practice.
