Building
A Popular Education Movement In Sub Sahara Africa
By: Denja Yaqub
Introduction
Popular education has been more associated with the struggles
in Latin America, basically because of the strength of its impact in organizing
powerful fighting movements in that continent and the roles played by Paulo
Freire, who has become synonymous with the term as a result of his work with
the oppressed, especially in Brazil which gave the concept a deeper ideological
and political relevance as an effective tool for mobilization of people for social
change.
The concept is as old as education itself, as it has been
used overtime by the capitalist ruling class in Europe and North America fundamentally
to further suppress the weak and subjugated from organizing against the system.
The ruling class in these parts of the world, centuries ago, never believed the
poor deserve any education beyond skill development.
In the eighteenth century for instance, “working class people in English
speaking countries did not have the right to formal education and some
educators and members of the aristocracy seriously argued that education would
confuse and agitate working people.”[1]
Those in authority in those countries however later saw the need for the
working class to have education but such education must be limited only to
trainings in basic skills.
Education in whatever ways or means is political and it’s
itself a weapon in class struggles as it is a means of conscientization of the
people as education is the fastest means of giving political education to the
people in such a way that benefits people, society and systems. It is the
bedrock of society and therefore, education cannot be without class interest. Indeed,
education re-humanizes society.
For popular education, while it is not opposed to individual
skills development, as opposed to the ultimate intent of formal education which
focuses on the individual more than the society, it is about giving education
to those denied access to formal education in the simplest of ways not only to develop
the individual but also to give political consciousness about their environment
and provide alternatives that will cause social changes to the benefit of the
society.
Here we will trace the origin of popular education and how it
was used by capitalism to suppress and deny the subjugated from challenging
oppression and how the oppressed changed its methodologies and used it
effectively against the ruling class.
Popular education has been a major tool that has been used
effectively against all forms of oppression including the struggles against
colonialism, apartheid, capitalism and all structures of injustices and it
remain the option even for Africa if the struggle against neo liberalism and
all its institutions, policies and strategies must be combated.
Concepts of Popular
Education
There are several notions of popular education, but four of
them seem appropriate for the mission of this paper:
1.
Working
class education during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;
2.
Radical
political education;
3.
Adult
education; and
4.
The
tradition developed by Paulo Freire through his “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”.
·
The Working Class Education Concept
The working class education concept as developed in Europe
and North America around the period of 18th and 19th
centuries was rooted in a type of education that is developed for their common interests
under their supervision to counter the aristocrats who believed workers and the
poor would be agitated and “confused” if allowed access to education.
This was against the backdrop of serious class antagonism to
workers education as the ruling class and their ideologues believed the poor do
not need education based on the following:
They
will be “too proud to work” if educated;
·
They
will make demands for increase in their wages;
·
They
will not want to engage in jobs that demeans them;
· It
may be fine teaching them to read but detrimental to let them have the ability
to write.
One of the proponents of this belief was a certain Bernard de
Mandeville, the author of Fable of the Bees. In the second
edition of this book, Bernard added a new chapter for the purpose of espousing
his anti workers education clearer. In the new chapter of the book published in
1723 with the title, Essays on Charity and Charity Schools,
as mentioned in Neuburg, V. (1971) Popular Education In Eighteenth Century
England[2].
According to Neuburg, De Mendeville’s thesis was based on his
belief that nations cannot develop without having a lot of their citizens kept
in perpetual ignorance. The more uneducated workers there are the better for
the growth of the economy based on the principle of exploitation.
Indeed, the British Parliament, the House of Commons in
particular, once debated this in 1807 when Davies Giddy who was a member of the
parliament at the time said, ironically, on the floor of the House of Commons
that “giving
education to the labouring classes of the poor…….would be prejudicial to their
morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead
of making them good servants in agriculture and other labouring employments.
Instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them fractious and
refractory”[3].
Not until the second half of the nineteenth century after the
passage of the Reform and Education Acts when some guided education was
introduced, the working people and their allies, the peasants, were denied
education. And even then, education was mainly provided through communal
efforts for the children of the poor and working people, with the assistance of
churches and local employers who still believe that education should not be in
a form that allows critical thinking.
Consequently, the poor and working people formed themselves
into study groups and organized community programmes through their associations
to discuss religion and politics. But these were mere self help adult education
programmes and not necessarily discussion groups about the crisis of the
existing societal disorder or focused towards changes in religion, politics or
work rules in any qualitative form.
Indeed, Harold Sylver in his Concept of popular Education: A
Study of ideas and social movements in the early nineteenth century
(1965) believes popular education in the nineteenth century was organized in an
institutionalized military fashion of education for the people which were
resisted resulting in the establishment of Mechanic Institutes fundamentally
for the “diffusion of science among the working people”[4]
aimed at switching the working class from any influence that would instigate
class consciousness.
This process did not encourage any education that questions
authorities but made the conditions of the poor and working class appears
natural and made them feel poverty is a normal occurrence or self inflicted.
These institutes actually inserted in their constitutions that political
discussions were not allowed.
·
Radical Political Education Concept
This concept sought to change the authoritarian and
domineering methods used in the periods up to the nineteenth century by
creating alternatives that ensure the independence of working class education
through self-determined methods. They abhorred prescriptive curriculum and
teaching methods and believed that education must not be regimented if the
ultimate aim was to ensure free and independent thinking.
In Germany, the League for School Reforms was founded to
promote this concept which sought to value learning without formal structures
that hinder human relations, which dismisses the teacher – student kind of
relationship.
·
Adult Education Concept
This concept emerged when the growth of democracy in Europe
was becoming fragile and there was an urgent need to strengthen the capacity of
the citizens through community groups to play relevant roles in advancing
democracy and participation in decision making.
It is a concept that was targeted at making vulnerable groups
organize at grassroots or community levels around issues concerning their
specific interests. For instance, tenants can be organized around issues such
as the management of their estates in ways that would provide them improved and
better managed services.
The adult education concept is also about preparing
educationally disadvantaged individuals for a better future with higher
knowledge in their vocations or skills.
While adult education is in pursuance of personal skills
development, popular education is also about the development of individual
skills that will be of positive essence to society and can influence social
change.
·
Paulo Freire”s “Pedagogy of the
Oppressed” Concept
Developed in the early 60s by a Brazillian, Paulo Freire who
had done a lot of work with rural peasants and urban poor, this concept is
about working with the oppressed to analyze their situations, organize and take
actions that will change their unjust systems, and not just learning to read
and write.
Paulo Freire’s concept as espoused through his Pedagogy
of the Oppressed is the most popular concept and many writers believe
that popular education that generates mass actions originated from Freire’s
concept. It is about empowering socio economically and politically marginalized
people to take full control of their own learning in all aspects for the
purpose of effecting social change.
To Paulo Freire, education is not neutral and the process of
learning does have a direct link with what is being taught, who is teaching and
its purpose. Education in all forms is political.
Education that must allow people to learn through their own
experience, empower them to ask critical questions about their existence and
work together to change the formational basis of injustice is what the
oppressed need and Freire conceived of this process as a political education and
action process through which the oppressed can break the culture of silence
against all structures of injustice.
Freire’s concept as contained in his books: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Pedagogy of Hope and Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of
Liberation inspired critical education or political education and social
movements across Latin America, Africa, Asia, North America and Europe and was
used successfully by liberation theologists and movements in South America as
well as South Africa where the church played critical roles in liberation
struggles.
Africa needs Popular
Education Movement
Africa indeed needs not just a popular education movement but
a borderless popular movement to confront the onslaught on the continent by neo
liberal institutions that have systematically seized our economies and social
structures in their desperation to engage us in second slavery.
In the face of the excruciating implications of globalization
on our economies and politics, we need an exceptionally strong popular education
movement that will cut across all countries and regions in Africa; connecting
not just trade unions but the entire social movement built around an alternative
that is capable of satisfying the needs of our people and freeing us from the
prevailing circumstances of second slavery.
Today, Africa has become a convenient ground for unchallenged
neo liberalism because our governments has offered themselves as heartless hi-tech
compradors who believe they exist only in and for the service of imperialism.
For instance, all over Africa, lands are being given out to
neo liberal interests without consideration for national or communal interests
of our people. In fact, Ethiopia, a country that suffered famine for decades,
has given out several thousands of hectares of her fertile land to foreign
interests in the guise of the so called Foreign Direct Investment, for the
production of “food or biofuel jetropha when ordinary Ethiopians go hungry.”[5]
At the same time, Liberia too has signed off much of her land
and given it out to a Malaysian company called The Malaysian Sime Darby Company
which signed a 63 years agreement to take over 220, 000 hectares of Liberian
people’s land in four counties, namely: Grand Cape Mount, Bomi, Bong, and
Gbarpolu, for logging and agro business; specifically for oil and rubber
production. And when the Liberian people protested, President Ellen
Johnson-Shirleaf, one of the most disposed agents of imperialism in Africa, superciliously
told her people while addressing a Town Hall meeting on 6th December
2011 that “when your government and the representatives sign any paper with a
foreign country, the communities can’t change it. You are trying to undermine
your own government.” And finally she warned: “you can’t do that. If you do so
all the foreign investors coming to Liberia will close their businesses and
leave, then Liberia will go back to the old days.”
This is how African governments have sold our people into
second slavery. And it is almost impossible to find any African government that
is not guilty. This business of selling off Africa is being conducted through
all sorts appendages of neo liberalism such as the so called New Economic
Partnership for African Development, NEPAD and its military wing, the African
Command, AFRICOM; a military partnership through which imperialism train and
arm African soldiers against African people in the guise of fighting terrorism.
What is happening in North Africa, particularly Egypt and Syria where thousands
of unarmed protesters are being murdered within minutes, with bullets provided
by neo liberal interests is a clear practical indication of what AFRICOM is all
about, in case you are still in doubt.
Even the new consortium called BRICS – involving Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa – which paints the picture of an anti neo
liberalism cartel is nothing more than a centre for competition for space in
the onslaught against Africa. It has not shown any alternative to neo
liberalism rather it displays more of a gang up for competition for Africa,
like the old imperial scramble for Africa, with neo liberalism.
The haste with which our governments have moved our continent
into second slavery is quite disturbing. Policies originating from the
Washington Consensus of 1989, the intellectual warehouse of neo liberalism, are
being presented to our people as home grown. This has not only taken our lands,
it has also robbed us of incomes through the so called Foreign Direct
Investment, FDI, through which our countries are deceived into a free trade
system that encourages capital flight to Europe and North America with low tariffs
and yet claims we are engaged in a level playing, equal market free trade.
While all these are going on, the western media that are mostly
owned by neo liberal interests are busy praising our continent currently as
against the massive condemnations of the past. For instance, The
Economist have graduated from its headline in 2000 which appropriately
descried Africa as “The Hopeless Continent” to a deceitful headline: “The
Emerging Africa: A Hopeful Continent”, in its March 2013 edition.
According to Ama Biney, this new characterization is based on “the
alleged annual growth rates of over 5% in the past decade and that the African
continent has 9 of the world’s fastest growing economies.”[6]
For us who live in Africa, we know this cannot be true if the
quality of the life of our people, state of industrialization, unemployment
status, and provision of social services are to be considered as critical parts
of what constitute parameters for determining growth rate. The truth is, what has made the continent
“hopeful” is the increased acceptance of neo liberalism by our governments.
The challenge for us is to rebuild the movement if we are to
reclaim Africa from second slavery and grow through a people driven path that
ensures equity for all.
Popular education seems most appropriate because “the
most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”, as
Steve Biko is popularly known to have said. With a strong popular education
movement in Africa, the mind of the oppressed will be freed from the
oppressor’s manipulations and made to think and take actions that can displace
the oppressor. And Tajudeen Abdul Raheem was right when he wrote that “the
collective African experience is that we can only be ourselves and we need each
other to counter the threat of marginalization, rapacious globalization and the
consolidation of whatever little gains may have been accomplished I a number of
African countries.” And “no one (African) country can be sustainable
miracle if its neighbours are in hell.”[7]
In conclusion, one cannot but agree with Steve Faulkner, who
wrote in his article in the September/October 2007 edition of Pathways, “the
very existence of globalization provides golden opportunities to rebuild and
strengthen cross-border intercontinental worker-to-worker solidarity”[8]
because our governments now operate under the same economic policies handed
them by neo liberal institutions that presents these policies as if they were
locally generated but are the same faces of the same coins only different in
national currencies.
However, we can’t build internationalism with weak national
movements.
Part of the strategies of neo liberalism is to weaken or
totally destroy critical national organizations that are strong enough to
mobilize effective opposition to their incursions. In doing that they start
with education, which like their predecessors did centuries ago, have further
been made not just inaccessible but locked against critical intellectualism.
Trade unions have also come under severe attacks through the
denial of workers’ rights to belong to unions; sponsorship of internal crisis
that lead to either a total death of the unions or diversion of the purpose and
focus of the movement through fractionalization.
Conclusion
In building popular education in Sub Sahara Africa, we need
to return to our ideological commitment and organizational discipline; we need
to return to the peasants; we need to return to the working people and their
allies. We indeed need to rebuild a strong alliance with the people, who bear
the brunt of neo liberalism.
And this is possible and urgent.
References:
1.
Crowther,
J., Martin, I. & Shaw, M (1999) (Eds) Popular Education and Social Movements in
Scotland Today, Leicester; NIACE
2.
Neuburg
V (1971) Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England. London: The
Woburn Press
3.
Harold
Sylver (1965) Concept of Popular Education: A Study of ideas and social movements in
the early nineteenth century. MacGibbon & Kee, London
4.
Valerie
Miller and Lisa VeneKlassen (April 2012), Feminist Popular Education & Movement
Building - Draft Discussion Paper, JASS Associates 2006
5.
See
Ama Biney: Is Africa Really Rising? 2013-09-04 www.pambazuka.org
7.
See
J. Lichfield’s Treasure of Tyrants in The Independent of U.K P. 34-35, 13 July
2013
9.
Ditsela’s
Pathways
(Spring Edition. September/October 2007)
[1] (See Crowther J., Martin I., and
Shaw, M. 1999).
[2] Neuburg,
V. (1971) Popular Education In Eighteenth Century England
[3] (Neuburg, 1971)
[4] Harold
Sylver: Concept of popular Education: A
Study of ideas and social movements in the early nineteenth century
(1965)
[5] See
Ama Biney: Is Africa Really Rising? 2013-09-04 www.pambazuka.org
[6]
Ibid
[7] See
J. Lichfield’s Treasure of Tyrants in The Independent of U.K P. 34-35, 13 July
2013
[8] Ditsela’s
Pathways
(Spring Edition. September/October 2007)
Being a paper presented at the Ditsela 7th Education Conference held at St. Georges Hotel, Centurion, near Pretoria, South Africa 27 – 29 November 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment