Popular education as community organizing in El Salvador

Popular education played a major role in the 12-year war waged by the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front-FMLN) in El Salvador. One of the most sustained experiences of popular education anywhere occurred in FMLN-controlled zones. Most combatants and civilians were peasants, and few had had much opportunity for schooling in the communities where they grew up. Using the methods of popular education, the insurgent movement strove to fill the gap and provide them the education they had never had. Popular education was much more than what went on in the classroom. It was rooted in a community setting; it nourished and was nourished by political struggle. The existence, organizational form, and intellectual content of education were due to these relationships. I will argue that the Freirean model must be amended to take the community setting into account. In my view, this is the most important lesson of the Salvadoran experience for popular education elsewhere.