303 POPULAR EDUCATION: THE LATIN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE FRANCISCO VIO GROSSI

Abstract - The author discusses the theory and practice of popular education in Latin America, seen as an alternative model for social change at the popular level, rather than simply an educational method. The development of popular education is located in the context of the political-economic history of Latin America, and the consequences of this for the peasantry and the working class. The author presents the defining characteristics of popular education, together with its main tendencies, both negative and positive.

Introduction Latin American efforts for development have given rise, in the midst of decades of practice, to the current of popular education (PE), which is more than people's education; it is an alternative model for social change at the local level. The purpose of this paper is to consider the emergence of the practice, and the subsequent conceptualization of PE within the transformation process of the region. ~ Two opening observations must be made. The first is related to the difficulty of conceptualizing Latin America as a single entity. There are as deep political differences in Latin America as are witnessed by the existence of revolutionary Nicaragua, the thirty years old dictatorship of General Stroesher in Paraguay, the emerging new Argentinian democracy, and the 25st anniversary of the Cuban revolution. Economic distances exist not only International Review o f Education - Internationale Zeitschrift ffir Erziehungswissenschaft R e v u e Internationale de Pddagogie X X X (1984), 303-314. A l l rights reserved. Copyright © by Unesco Institute f o r Education, H a m b u r g and Martinus N i j h o f f Publishers, Dordrecht.

304 among countries (Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world, while Venezuela is a very important member of OPEC), but also amongst regions and social sectors within countries. People who live in the large industrialized city of S~o Paulo have much more in common, in their life styles, with New Yorkers than with their co-nationals in the Northeast of Brazil. Ethnic divisions complicate the picture further. In Bolivia, for example, it is almost impossible to organize a single National Literacy Campaign beause of the existence of so many different languages, a point stressed by Miguel Urioste, the Secretary General of the Bolivian Government, at the International Meeting of Popular Education for Peace held in Managua, September 1983. 2 The second observation is related to the difficulty of describing PE as a complete methodology or theory. It is still in the process of definition, and is more a social and political fact (hundreds of groups are practicing it everywhere in the region) than a coherent method. This limitation may be one of its most remarkable strengths, since PE emphasised the value of processes rather than results. One of the most important lessons that we Latin Americans have learned from years of struggle is the difficulty of finding final solutions apart from those which emerge from day-to-day people's practice.

Development and Adult Education: From Savage Capitalist Expansion to Standing on Our Own Feet Today it is common to assert the links between adult education and the broader socio-economic and political context, something rather hard to find twenty years ago among adult educators. They used to see their practice as neutral and self-centered, that is to say as one that arises and develops from itself, without socio-economic or political constraints. What follows is a set of propositions that will allow us to locate adult education within the context of the different social formations that exist in the region. This will allow us to comprehend the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to adult education, and the subsequent emergence of popular education. The approach is necessarily historical and structuralistic in the sense of attempting to isolate the main tendencies of the transformation process, in order to establish some links between these trends and the role assigned to adult education in such forms as literacy, remedial education, technical education and, finally, popular education. In this analysis it is not my intention to be mechanistic. The development process is not unilinear, and it is not characterized by the simple domination of one mode of production that dissolves all others. What often occurs is that an emergent dominant mode re-

305 organizes the residual ones with the purpose of articulating them to itself. It is therefore better to talk about a social formation, seen as the combination of different modes of production under the dominance of one of them. An analysis of this kind helps to explain the coexistence of different approaches to development, and therefore of different programmes of adult education in a given society, with the dominant forms being those which conveniently adjust to the current social formation, but with some alternative forms existing at the same time. Without this perspective, it would not be easy to explain the existence of an important movement of PE in Chile under the authoritarian military regime of General Pinochet.

The Historical and Structural Context

Up to the crisis of the 1930s, in almost all the countries of the region, the prevailing economic strategy was directed towards the export of raw materials. During this period, which coincided with the organization of nation states, societies were based on the rural areas and mining, generally organised in enclaves for export production. In the countryside, big haciendas coexisted with subsistence peasant economies where labour reproduced itself at zero cost for the dominant social sectors. Politically the dominant groups were made up of oligarchies unchallenged by any other socio-economic sectors. The domination that they exerted was of a savage type, given that there were no counter-forces to induce them to hide what has been called the 'ugly face of capitalism'.3 These hegemonic groups were interested in asserting ideological domination as well through the imposition of their own culture. As Alberti and Cotler stress, 'the dominant sector controls, without any restriction the values of the educational system of the society. It imposes as well a normative apparatus that legitimizes their status through a simbiology, that often even has magic-religious connotations, promoting the values of the dominant sector in order to incorporate them into the culture of the dominated'.4 This form of traditional domination generally develops with the emergence and expansion of merchant capitalism and is linked to authoritarian political regimes. Dominant groups organize the socio-economic system to establishing partly developed capitalist social relations with the dominated groups, who are usually also ethnically different. In order to justify capitalist expansion, and the subsequent expropriation of natives' lands, together with the imposition of economic and extra-economic means of coercion, the concept of cultural (and even racial) superiority is established. This ideological process has two main goals. On the one hand, the dissemination of the dominant culture and, on the other, the internalization and

306 subsequent reproduction of this culture in the minds of the oppressed in the name of national integration. In this period the corresponding form of education may be called Culturalist. It is characterized by the extension of literacy in Spanish (not in native languages), catechism and history, together with maths for promoting merchantilism. This stage attempts to achieve the homogeneization of adult education, with the intention of integrating those who drop out of the normal school system in remedial education. The methodology corresponds to the authoritarian-oligarchic style and is based on imitation-repetition. The text is the predominant educational material. There is no participation from the adult, and the central goal of the educational process is the mechanical transference of pre-determined and uniform knowledge. In this way 'the authoritarian and oligarchic system impressed its seal on the civil society, and the culturalist stage of adult education reinforced the goals of assimilation, adaptation and conformism of vast sections of the population'. 5As is known, the 1930s crisis produced a deep questioning of the traditional social formation in Latin America, a process that was sharpened as a consequence of World War II. The key point was the fragility of the mono-export model. The development of protectionism in the center, the provisional closing of foreign markets, and the deepening of social conflicts within the national societies, paved the way to new approaches. The main new approach was modernization, based on an industrialized process that needed foreign technology, together with an expansion of internal markets to support national industry. Also required was external investment, and the destruction of the socio-economic and cultural resistance of peasants to their integration into national economies. In education, an emphasis was put on social mobility, so that as Rama says, 'the masses were integrated into a new kind of consensus around the belief that the benefits of education meant social improvement'. 6 Adult education thus became technocratic, emphasizing the role that labour plays in the modernization process. INACAP in Chile, INCE in Venezuela, SENA in Colombia, SENAI in Brasil were organized in order to train workers in new technologies. Methods were centered on learning by doing, and manuals replaced texts. In the countryside efforts were made to replace so-called traditional technologies with those centered on cash crops through extension services (transference of information), training (systematic transference of knowledge and skills), credit, and technical assistance. The final intention was to introduce new needs linked to the market. The most orthodox communitydeveloped programmes tried to convert peasants from the satisfaction of needs defined by themselves (felt needs) to those defined by external agents (real needs). In this way, traditional agricultural producers were trapped in

307 a market which compelled them to consume manufactured goods and produce in order to be able to afford them. Development was conceived as a transitional process from old ways characterized by low productivity, small commercial farming and an economic rationale that gave priority to stability and the reproduction of a traditional way of living, towards a modern life style centered on maximizing surplus, increasing risks, permanently improving production and productivity, and lowering costs. Adult education in the rural areas has to contribute in facilitating this process by breaking peasant resistance. Starting by the recognition of local family and political structures, the isolation and analysis of felt needs, the introduction of modern technologies, sometimes even limited agrarian reforms (such as in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela) and nowadays Integrated Rural Development programmes, the intention was the same: to transform peasants into the old dream of planners, small farmers, American style. However, 'subsistance agriculture is still prevalent in Latin America' 7, because peasants in different ways are still resisting their dissolution. PE represents an alternative to culturalist and technocratic approaches. Its starting point is the recognition that development is not possible without structural changes, which are not going to come by the will of hegemonic groups, but from the mobilization and conscientization of the oppressed. Adult education must therefore contribute to this mobilization, with methods that produce both organization and pressures for change on the existing unjust system.

Popular Education: Its Basic Characteristics The very term 'popular education' implies an alternative education to the official or dominating one. It is the education of the dominated, oppressed and exploited sectors themselves and, as such, it must tackle the causes of their problems instead of reinforcing them as 'non-popular' education does. Popular education is part of a broader process of transformation of social structures in favour of the oppressed. This process takes place within a complex of activities carried out by the people during the course of their everyday life in order to survive and meet their needs. The task of popular education is to contribute to the development of people's consciousness concerning the real causes of the problems that they encounter, in order to increase their capacity to mobilize themselves by participating in organizations and supporting them. The creation of awareness in order to organize and mobilize is not an activity to be directed from the top by the educator, as happens with the conventional approaches to training. It must emerge from the day-to-day activi-

308 ties of the people themselves and from their collective reflection of these activities. The educator is not an external agent who is needed to stimulate development. He or she is more a facilitator who helps encourage this process so that it takes place more smoothly and in a coherent manner. It is for this reason that popular training programmes are generally linked with programmes in fields such as technology, health, adult education and other activities designed to raise living standards. Educational activity is thus not a mere academic abstraction. It is closely related to concrete reality. The process of acquiring knowledge about reality goes from the everyday reality to certain forms of abstraction to validate (or refute) the new knowledge in action. Popular education seems to emphasize what Piaget said about there being no mental category which does not have its origins in some concrete practice. This is why it insists on its permanent character of actionreflection-action. This is especially the case in peasant training. There is a great deal of evidence that the peasants learn more easily what concerns them directly and has immediate practical significance. In fact, in the case of the Arhuaca community or the educational experience of CINDE on the Pacific Coast of Colombia, peasants always have a broad and coherent system for analyzing the causes and effects of phenomena. The job is thus not only to generate new knowledge but to integrate it into an existing structure of causality. In other words, the challenge is to systematize the peasants' individual and collective experiences and the new knowledge that is emerging, and integrate it all in a process that becomes ever more harmonious and precise. The task of popular education, starting from concrete practice, is to stimulate this process of unveiling the peasant world and its causal structure. This must be a collective process, with the objective of generating participation and organization. Popular education programmes share a critical attitude towards dependent capitalistic development styles. They claim to contribute, in the education field, to the definition of a model of alternative development, which is characterized by being participatory and democratic, with an equitable distribution of goods and services. This development style is not to be created only at the moment of change in political power, as Leninism seems to advocate. On the contrary, decision-making in the production, construction and development of an emerging and challenging culture, and control over the educational process, are elements which must always be present in popular education efforts, not only for educational reasons but also because they are the germs of the future society. As was said by a participant in the National Meeting of Popular Education, which took place in Santiago (Chile) in 1982: 'In the same way as the Kingdom of God starts in this world, so future society must be started now, however adverse the objective circumstances may be'.

309 In sum, popular education demands that there be a close link between the process of generating and acquiring knowledge and action. It assumes that there is a commitment to: 1. reveal, recognize and validate the causal structure of the situations experienced by the community, including its norms and values; 2. support the practical activities carried out within this structure in order to develop and broaden it, the point of departure being a constant and increasing questioning; 3. promote the broadest and most active participation of the peasants in these processes in order to facilitate their taking collective control over the productive process and of their own lives through organization. This presupposes handing control of rural development projects over to them; 4. give these activities a permanent character, i.e. they are not limited in time; 5. allow, indeed, encourage the community to develop the whole process itself, under its own leadership, using its knowledge and resources. The trainer is only a facilitator.

Tendencies of Popular Education However, there are at least three principal tendencies in popular education, understood as an alternative education of the people for change. The first emerged as a result of the failure of technocratic methods for training peasants. This tendency adopted popular education as an alternative approach to social integration, with the precise aim of maintaining the peasants in their present conditions. This is at times necessary for the functioning of the present system as it reduces the rural/urban migration flows, gives business cheap seasonal labour, and induces peasants to produce food cheaply for the city, etc. To keep peasants on the land it is necessary to support socio-economic and cultural programmes to accompany their efforts to be self-sufficient. In other words, programmes are aimed at 'capturing' and systematizing the knowledge accumulated by the peasants in order to develop it within the limits of the resources available to them (appropriate technology) and the prevailing social order (which is not questioned, nor is the current land tenure system). It is not difficult to come across governmental programmes of popular education which have adopted principles of popular education, but excluding those aspects that challenge the existing social system. But neither is it true that popular education can only be carried out by non-governmental organizations. To say this would be to overlook the advances made by some social categories and classes whose interests have in

310 fact been reflected in the State. It would also imply a static concept of the way in which the popular classes behave. It would be more accurate to talk of a dialectic process, situating educational activities within a conceptual framework which allows the incorporation of the various mechanisms used by the dominated sectors of the people to struggle for their survival and to bring about social transformation. It is especially important to understand the strengths and limitations of these actions, on the one hand, and, on the other, to realize what is behind them. In other words, the existing social system can co-opt popular education, taking from it what it needs, throw out the dangerous elements and make it function according to the ultimate interests of the prevailing social structures and accumulated capital. The traditional manipulators like to dress up in new clothes in order to ensure, like the Leopard of Lampedusa, that everything changes in order for it to stay the same. The second tendency has also been accused of manipulation. It has emerged from the 'conscientization' practices in m a n y programmes during the 1960s and the first part of the 1970s. These programmes emphasized the need for the people to become aware of the national social structure and of the urgent need to transform it. It maintains that the people cannot liberate themselves while there are structures which prevent them from doing so. As Bosco Pinto says: 'There cannot be any transformation in education as there are no structural changes which can bring about a real change. As long as there is a productive system which separates people into privileged groups, it is not possible to break the educational structure of domination, dependency, "ideologization" and "alienation". In simpler terms, Gianotten and de Wit illustrate this type of popular education in the following way: the trainer believes that the peasants have a false and immediate consciousness of r e a l i t y . . . I know what is good for them (to raise their consciousness), how they can and must participate in the class struggle. I am therefore going to motivate (conscientize) them so that they participate.' This tendency in popular education has been accused of being 'vertical': conscientizers represent the people's consciousness without any previous consultation with them, giving it a determined content which they transfer, through the techniques of popular education (from the simple to the more complete, from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the general). The content was above all ideological, without a real link to the peasants' and people's struggle. A variant of this second tendency is that practised by certain movements which elaborate action plans based on their knowledge of reality and in which they 'consult' with the grassroots groups. Their discussions therefore

311 take place within the parameters that they themselves establish, and the result is 'a sort of mixture between what the change agent thinks and what the other members of the community think concerning the right solution.' In sum, this tendency of popular education presupposes that the conscientization process succeeds in making the non-conscientized peasants reach a level of consciousness that is similar to that of the trainer, based on the praxis of the peasants themselves. This is the reason why it has been called vertical and, though more subtle than the first tendency, manipulatory. The third tendency has, rather, been criticized for containing a certain degree of anarchism together with an utopian and ingenuous view of the relationship between the trainer and the peasants. It also tries, like the second tendency, to promote social structural change, departing from the self-defined needs of the people. For this reason it has no explicit model of what the final society will be, although there is an implicit one. They feel that such a model does not exist except as the result of the processes themselves of action-reflection-action carried out by the oppressed. There is a process of change when civil society expands vis4tvis the State. For this reason it emphasizes the need for autonomous people's organizations with a view to moving towards, in everyday practices, alternative development styles.

Some Remaining Questions about PE Within this approach, there are still some questions that the literature has not elaborated sufficiently. Among them it is possible to highlight the value of popular knowledge, the role of the popular educator, participation, and action.

a) The value assigned to popular knowledge. During the sixties and part of the seventies, scientific and technological knowledge gained the unanimous confidence of developmentalists and social scientists in general. Science was to finally solve the problems of poverty. Adult education had to disseminate technological knowledge to the marginal. Today it seems that we are retreating from this trend, and have doubts about science's ability to overcome injustice. The modernization process, like the green revolution, has made the rich richer and the poor poorer. New approaches propose giving value again to traditional knowledge which is

312 more able to cope with the day-to-day needs of food, health and housing. Education consists of helping to capture, systematize and develop that knowledge. Ecology, popular technologies, and horizontal communication are concepts that replace verticality in the process of the transference of knowledge. Some have been led, however, to the conclusion that the people are always right and never make mistakes. They ignore the fact that within popular culture there are many elements deposited by the dominant ideological apparatus. People have been, through the ages, ideologized to make them unable to delve their own reality and mobilize to transform it. What is needed is a process of ideologization that allows the detatchment of external elements from those that belong to the people. That is why Boris Lima, in an interesting paper presented to the II Seminar on Participatory Research of Venezuela (organized by CESAP and CEAAL) makes the distinction between reproductive and transformative knowledge. The first one allows the system to reproduce itself permanently, and the second one attempts to change it. 8 Fals Borda calls these forms official or dominant knowledge and emergent knowledge. The first one defines itself as 'scientific' and is consistent with economic, social and political attempts of the hegemonic groups to reproduce itself through the official apparatus of ideologization. The second one is generated through different forms, attitudes, behaviours, techniques, strategies, etc., that the oppressed have adopted in order to defend themselves from efforts to dissolve them or at least neutralize them. 9 Both types of knowledge have different rationales and are equally valuable for their own purposes. The task for popular groups is, therefore, to articulate, systematize and develop this alternative knowledge. This would not need to imply the rejection of contributions that came from official sciences. On the contrary, the question is how to activate all the processes of knowledge generation and adoption useful for specific purposes.

b) The role of popular education In basing educational processes in popular groups, the educator seems to lose a pecise location and to transform him/herself into both a mere spectator of the process but at the same time, into a person who is concerned with how endogenous knowledge emerges and develops autonomously. This is obviously a wrong View. Critical education as a process of knowledge generation is a permanent day-to-day activity of social groups. Human beings always need to respond to the challenges and obstacles that reality puts forward. Starting from this process of solving problems (action), he/she elaborates some general prin-

313 ciples (theory) that are applied in practice again in order to validate them. What distinguishes this spontaneous process with education is the systematic effort of the 'last person' as engendered by the action of the educator. His/her contribution is in promoting a particular dynamic, and in putting at the disposal of the groups the technical instruments that allow them to have an increasingly more precise comprehension of this social and historical situation in order to begin to transform it.

c) The question o f action The best way to know how a given social reality works is to attempt to change it. The links between popular education and action are very close. Firstly, the educational process is always directed towards action. Secondly, popular education is validated by action, that is to say, by the process of applying new knowledge to satisfy needs. Thirdly, popular education only proposes action leading to structural social change.

Conclusions

Popular education in Latin America has emerged and developed quickly all over the region. It has captured the imagination and will of educators, women, cooperativists, unionists, ecologists and other activists, and it is developing in practice, in a way which is consistent with its assumptions, but we are still in the process of learning how to produce a comprehensive definition and elaborated theory. Perhaps we shall never reach that stage, but the promise clearly exists.

Notes

1. Most of the hypotheses presented here have been extracted from the monograph Investigacifi en Educaci6n de Adultos de Amdrica Latina. Santiago de Chile: UNESCO/OREALC, 1983. 2. This meeting was organized by CEAAL, the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE), the Ministry of Education of Nicaragua and the Highlander Center of the USA. 3. As is happening again, as Yusuf Kassam and Patrick Healley argue in the introduction to this issue (p. 237). 4. Alberti, G. and Cotler, L. Aspectos Sociales de la Educaci6n en el Perti. Lima, 1972, p. 15. 5. See Tapia, G. Condicionantes socio-econ6rnicos de los programas de educacidn de adultos en Venezuela. Caracas: Convenio ICAE/FUNDACOMUN, 198t.

314 6. Rama, G. Op. cit., pp. 343 and 345. 7. C E P A L / F A O . Desarrollo social rural en Amdrica Latina. Montevideo, Agosto 1978, no. 78. 8. Lima, B. 'El agente propulsor y el trabajo de base'. H Seminario Nacional de Investigacidn Participativa. Abril 3 - 5 , 1981. Mimeo. 9. Fals Borda, O. Reflexiones sobre la Investigaci6n Participativa. Abril 3 - 5, 1981. Caracas, Venezuela. Mimeo.

Bibliography

Vio Grossi, Francisco. Investigaci6n en Educaci6n de Adultos en Amdrica Latina. Santiago de Chile: UNESCO/OREALC, 1983. Alberti, G. and Cotler, L. Aspectos Sociales de la Educaci6n en el Perd. Lima, 1972. Tapia, G. Condicionantes socio-econ6micas de los programas de educaci6n de adultos en Venezuela. Caracas: Convenio I C A E - F u n d a c o m t i n , 1981. Rama, G. 'Educaci6n, estructura social y estilos de sesarrollo'. Perspectivas - Revista Trimestral de Educacidn. VIII (1978), No. 3 (Paris: UNESCO). Cepal - FAO N. 78. Desarrollo social rural en Amdrica Latina. Montevideo, Uruguay, Agosto 1978. Bosco Pinto, Joao. Metodologfa de la lnvestigaci6n Temdtica. Bogot~i: I I C A CIDA, 1969. Lima, B. ElAgentepropulsory el trabajo de base. Caracas, Venezuela: I1 Seminario Nacional de Investigaci6n Participativa, Abril 1981. Fals Borda, O. Reflexiones sobre la Investigaci6n Participativa. Caracas, Venezuela: I1 Seminario Latinoamericano de Investigaci6n Participativa, Abril 1981.

- Der Verfasser behandelt Theorie und Praxis der Volksbildung in Lateinamerika, die eher als ein alternatives Modell zur gesellschaftlichen Ver/inderung auf allgemeiner Ebene als eine reine Bildungsmethode verstanden wird. Die Entwicklung der Volksbildung wird im Zusammenhang mit der politisch-wirtschaftlichen Geschichte Lateinamerikas und deren Auswirkung auf den Bauern-stand und die Arbeiterklasse angesehen. Der Verfasser stellt die genau umrissenen Charakteristiken der Volksbildung mit ihren sowohl negativen als auch positiven Hauptstr6mungen vor. Zusammenfassung

- L'auteur analyse la th6orie et la pratique de l'6ducation populaire qui est pergue en Am6rique Latine plus comme un mod6le alternatif de changement social au niveau populaire, qu'un simple m6thode 6ducative. Le d6veloppement de l'6ducation populaire est h placer dans le contexte de l'histoire politico-economique de l'Am6rique Latine et de ses cons6quences pour la paysannerie et la classe des travailleurs. L'auteur d6gage les caract6ristiques essentielles de l'6ducation populaire en m~me temps que ses principales tendances aussi bien n6gatives que positives. R~sum~