Popular culture and popular education: an expression of Freire's proposal for a kind of education system

This work discusses proposals of popular culture and popular education. The education system developed by Paulo Freire in 1960 can be applied from primary education to college. These proposals gather elements to think beyond the traditional education methods. In these methods, pieces of "cultural information" and education in their multiple expressions are used as pedagogical tools whose main purpose is the dissemination of dominant knowledge among a larger population. The social movements of the sixties, a time during which culture and education were rediscovered in a dialogue with popular culture, dreamt about becoming ways of performing a biunivocal communication of awareness effect. Then, they take values of groups' cultures and popular communities' values as adequate elements for collective reflection on living conditions and meanings of popular symbols; followed by a collective reflection that substantiated popular thoughts of human and critical sense, which popular cultural movements recognized as lost concepts that were thrown away when they were translated into "mass culture". Therefore, it should bring a renewed sense of how to interpret, live and transform the world. Thus, we discuss current possibilities of transforming traditional education into a new humanizing perspective that would encompass all levels of education, from primary schools to universities.