Popular education is a process which aims to empower people who are marginalized socially and politically to take control of their own learning and to effect social change. From the excellent training collective Trapese and the bubbling So We Stand movement in the UK to Cantera in Nicaragua, pop.ed is used as a movement building tool for radical change - from Clydebank by Glasgow airport to Southall fighting a gas site I have been helping to facilitate pop.ed workshops to strive for environmental justice.
'Breaking through the culture of silence' and 'breaking down the barriers of blame and scapegoating' popular eduction is a problem-posing education which encourages people to think for themselves and question the values and attitudes of the rich and powerful who exploit and try to brainwash them and then create possible solutions. Problem-posing offers all subject matter as historical products to be questioned rather than as central bank wisdom to be accepted – you are not filling empty minds with official or unofficial knowledge but posing knowledge in any form as a problem for mutual inquiry. This workshop highlights popular education methods in organising workshops, events and actions to build confidence, competence and commitment within and between individuals, groups, organisations and communities. It will build strong relationships with other people to support each other to produce knowledge, as part of sustained concerted actions based on a shared understanding of the need for intense political social change.
'The curriculum comes out of the concrete experience and material interests of people in communities of resistance and struggle. It is focused primarily on group as distinct from individual learning and development. It assumes a direct connection between education and social change' International Popular Education Network, 2004
'And as to the causes of social change, I look at it in this way- ideas are a sort of parliament, but there's a commonwealth outside, and good deal of commonwealth is working at change without knowledge what the parliament is doing'. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
