José Martí and popular education: a return to the sources

Abstract

This article presents José Martí as a historical source of popular education in Latin America. It starts from the assumption that there can be no true re-foundation without the return to those founding moments, ideas or principles of popular education. After giving a brief account of Martí's work and thought, we characterize the concept of popular education as education of the people, in the sense of a universal education. On a different level, we seek to identify in Martí's work elements of popular education as a political-pedagogical movement that takes shape especially since the latter half of the 20th century. The premise here is that at some given point people's education and popular education cease to be equivalent terms, and that in José Martí we find elements to think about these two terms dialectically, in a movement of re-creation of a practice that, albeit cleaved by historical contingencies, is whole. Four pillars of popular education are identified in his work: valuing the plurality of knowledges; the interpersonal relationship as the milieu for teaching-learning, and basis of social transformation; the knowledge of reality from an emancipative perspective as a political act; and education as self-formative process of society.