What is Popular Education?

Popular education is an educational approach that collectively and critically examines everyday experiences and raises consciousness for organizing and movement building, acting on injustices with a political vision in the interests of the most marginalized.

~ Paulo Freire

Popular education comes from Latin America where popular means “of the people.” Popular education refers to a method of education that encourages people to teach and learn from each other about issues that matter most in their lives, issues that will allow them to organize together for social change.

Popular education requires the “learners” to define what they need in order to learn. Lessons are not dictated by a teacher or leader based on what they know or what they think is important. Popular education is non-hierarchical. The boundaries between learners and teachers are intentionally blurred, with each teaching the other according to their personal skills, knowledge, and lived realities. Popular education may be defined as a technique designed to raise the consciousness of its participants and to allow them to become more aware of how personal experiences are connected to larger societal problems. It has the potential to empower people to collectively organize to change issues affecting their lives.ⁱ

This approach has been used around the world as a method to analyse how things work and to organize for change. For example in Brazil, peasants who were displaced from their land rallied together, learned about the issues, analysed the key players in the situation, and mobilized broad support. This action lead the landless peasants back to their rightful land.

Popular education has also been a key component in other mobilization efforts and ongoing battles of land reclamation. In the United States Myles Horton and the Highlander Centre put popular education on the map in the 1930s when they organized meetings with people in the Southern U.S. to better their life circumstances. In naming issues of concern, people mentioned that they wished they could vote in order to have an effect on the political processes. The result was a popular education approach that mobilized a massive voter drive. This process focused on local people, collectively learning about political issues while also learning to read.

In Canada, popular education has been used to mobilize communities to protest free trade and to organize social justice campaigns with union workers. Popular education is not just learning for the purpose of acquiring knowledge, but learning so that you can make a difference in the world. Popular education can be applied in any setting where you are looking for action that will affect social change. It is not a set process or defined method with steps that must be followed, rather it is about reflecting with others and figuring out ways to take action to change our lives and in our world.

The key components to popular education are:

• Understanding that learning starts with what is important in the lives of the participants

• Understanding that learning is a process that names and addresses power imbalances in the world, as well as in the collective group

• Understanding that the main goal of popular education is to create positive social change