The 21st Century Learning Renaissance and Popular Education: Convergences or Divergences

• In Event: 46.012 - Learning From the Popular Education Tradition: Lessons From the Global South

Abstract

The 21st Century Learning Renaissance and Popular This paper proceeds from the premise that popular education is ultimately a life perspective and not just an approach to education. It argues that despite its varying traditions, popular education stems from a life perspective that upholds the sanctity of equal rights and opportunities and most importantly, the right to self-determine. Especially since the mid 20th century, popular education upholds education among inalienable rights particularly for the poor and the marginalized. Given its focus group, popular education is saliently grounded in the analyses of the nature of inequality and the resultant oppression, exploitation and injustice. Unlike the discourse of “conventional education” it beholds the poor and the marginalized as self-benefiting agents rather than beneficiaries of their educational experience. It solidly recognizes their intellectual power to analyze their real life situations and their collective power to transform these situations for the “self-determined better”. As such, good quality and relevant education should not just be about equipping people with knowledge, skills, affects and technology savvy to better contribute to and benefit from the status quo, in addition, it should equip people with the critical consciousness to transform the status quo. Popular education therefore purports and supports a sociopolitical agenda of redress, equality, justice and peace. The paper highlights convergences and divergences between popular and “conventional” education placing an accent on the mutual concern for equal right to education, especially for the poor and the marginalized, who, by volume, are in the Global South. It tracks global dialogue and policies on equal rights to education starting in the 1960s with global normative instruments such as UN Conventions and Recommendations, through decades of Internationally Agreed Goals (IAGs) to the currently emerging Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Proxy evidence is presented to demonstrate how the Global South faired and how unequal rights to education remain a daunting challenge. The paper concludes that the combined intensification of the social equity imperative and the persistent failure of conventional education systems especially though not exclusively in the Global South have given impetus to the 21st century learning renaissance. Ultimately, key canons of this renaissance figure high in the post-2015 global education agenda and in popular education’s recognition of education not only as a right in itself but as a key enabler of other rights. In essence, there is convergence on the in-supportability and un-sustainability of inequality but divergence on the nature and role of education.

Author

• Mmantsetsa Marope, UNESCO