What is Popular Education?

Popular Education is both old and new. It has always been there — guiding people, helping them give sense and meaning to their lives, aiding them in their struggles. And yet it's quite new: people are still beginning to explore its dimensions and possibilities.

For PEPE, Pop-Ed means liberative education. It is relevant. It is needed. An education that exposes and then breaks the cultural and structural bonds hindering people's enlightenment and empowerment. Pop-Ed is education for social change.

It challenges the traditional way of "teaching" people, an 'education' that makes them passive learners; one that silences them and makes them conform. It challenges attitudes and social structures that oppress people.

Popular Education takes a political stand on the side of the marginalized people everywhere. It aims to empower the poor and those who had been kept out of decision-making structures. It does this by helping them become aware of their own oppression. Pop-Ed conscientizes people. It is about collective learning towards action for change.

According to Mr. Edicio de la Torre, a well-known Filipino educator, there are at least three connotations of the word 'popular' in popular education. The most immediate is that it is accessible, not elitist and is closely connected to the idea of popularization, or propagating to a broader public what would otherwise be specialized or restricted knowledge. It has a connotation, both good and bad, of simplification. Another related idea is that pop-ed is not boring.

The second connotation is standpoint: education for the people, in the service of the people. Liberating, empowering. This has tended to emphasize content: whatever is considered 'true' and 'correct.'

The third connotation is of people creatively expressing themselves. Not necessarily 'correct' at every point of the process, but nevertheless authentic. Compared to the second connotation, the bias here would be for methods of participation and facilitation that are both evocative and provocative. People as subjects, speaking their word. They may have learned the words from many sources, but they have appropriated them, made them their own.

We believe that Pop-Ed is about collective learning, that everyone has a stake in the generation and sharing of knowledge. Learners are not passive recipients of knowledge created elsewhere. Learning is generative and experiential. It evolves. Pop-ed blurs the distinction between teacher and student. It recognizes the enormous potential of group cognitive activity, enabling us to manipulate symbols and language, helping us play with the power of tales. Because everyone gives, everyone ultimately receives knowledge richer and more in-tune with reality.

Pop-Ed helps us learn from our experiences. More, it helps us understand and make sense of our world, our life, our reality. Only when we truly understand our reality can we change it.

Pop-Ed critiques and challenges unequal power relations. It takes the side of the weak. Disempowerment happens everywhere and on every scale: at the factory, the office, or the classroom, at the global level and even between lovers. Pop-Ed's task is to unmask unequal relations of power in order to change them.

In a nutshell, Pop-Ed...
 

• critiques conventional modes of thinking;
• opens itself to critique;
• restores people's dignity and humanity;
• poses questions about our very existence;
• is a venue for "intersubjectivity";
• recognizes the equal importance of the non-rational;
• engages the intellectual as well as the other spheres of being human;
• is creative and reflective; and,
• is averse to any totalizing framework.

We can't delve deeply on all these points here, but suffice it to say that defining pop-ed is an ongoing process which, so far, has raised more questions than it can answer. In any case, pop-ed is a dynamic presence that is here to stay.