Popular education

Popular education is a concept grounded in notions of class, political struggle, and social transformation. The term is a translation from the Spanish or the Portuguese and rather than the English usage as when describing a 'popular television program', popular here means 'of the people'. More specifically 'popular' refers to the 'popular classes', which include peasants, the unemployed, the working class and sometimes the lower middle class. The designation of 'popular' is meant most of all to exclude the upper class and upper middle class.

Popular education is used to classify a wide array of educational endeavors and has been a strong tradition in Latin America since the end of the first half of the 20th century. These endeavors are either composed of or carried out in the interests of the popular classes. The diversity of projects and endeavors claiming or receiving the label of popular education makes the term difficult to precisely define. Generally, one can say that popular education is class-based in nature and rejects the notion of education as transmission or 'banking education'. It stresses a dialectic or dialogical model between educator and educand. This model is explored in great detail in the works of one of the foremost popular educators Paulo Freire.

Though sharing many similarities with other forms of alternative education, popular education is a distinct form in its own right. In the words of Liam Kane: "What distinguishes popular education from 'adult', 'non-formal', 'distance', or 'permanent education', for example, is that in the context of social injustice, education can never be politically neutral: if it does not side with the poorest and marginalised sectors- the 'oppressed' – in an attempt to transform society, then it necessarily sides with the 'oppressors' in maintaining the existing structures of oppression, even if by default."

Popular education began at the crossroads between politics and pedagogy, and strongly relies on the democratic ideal of the Enlightenment, which considered public education as a main tool of individual and collective emancipation, and thus the necessary conditions of autonomy, in accordance to Immanuel Kant's Was Ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?), published five years before the 1789 French Revolution, during which the Condorcet report established public instruction in France.

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