Latin American Adult Education Movements: Humanistic versus Structural Approach

In the history of old popular education experiences, two contrasting streams of popular education tradition co-existed: The Christian radicalism from Methodism to Liberation Theology on the one hand and the scientific Marxism” from Marxian manuscripts to the Nicaraguan Liberation Movement on the other: Interestingly, both streams have provided together a concrete foundation of the idea and ideology of popular education in the context of old social movements. In other words, the two approaches have been intertwined and have collaboratively challenged the brutal captialist control and have material monopoly in modern history, urging the creation of a new community model where humanistic voices were to be heard. The purpose of this article is two fold: First, I argue that the phenomenological difference in the two models of popular education, in fact, has to do with the two extremely different epistemological and philosophical backgrounds. Second, I argue in this article that the accommodation of scientificity or structural orientation of scientific Marxists into the former radical Christian s popular education movements eventually made the movement reified, instrumentalized, and influenced to lose its popular ground. For this purpose, first, I examined the popular characteristics or potentials of the two popular philosophy. Second, I compared the two forms of the Latin American experiences, the Christian Base Community and Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign, as the concrete realization of the two social thoughts, and discuss the problems, issues, and implications. In this article, I tried to reveal the paradox of the conflict in the realm of many historical moments, especially in the context of Latin American popular education movements since the 1930s. In most cases, unlike the theological approach which presupposed the metaphysical utopia and God s presence, the socialist approach, although it shared many similar aspects with the theological one, clearly revealed the inheritance of the remnant of modernist epistemology. “New“ popular education is now focusing on ecological context where the Marxist positivism called realismono longer emphasizes its scientificity, which had disabled people s emotional and realistic suffering in the name of scientific knowledge and rigorousness.”