Enlightened publics: Popular education movements in Europe, their legacy and promise

Abstract

Popular education movements can be dated back to the religious heresies of the Middle Ages but only become well-formed movements following the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In this article I outline the scope and nature of some of the most effective of these movements which have come to inform the concept of the ‘public sphere’ advanced by Jurgen Habermas. It continues with a brief description of contemporary popular education movements dating from the anti-imperialist liberation struggles of the mid-twentieth century and the post-Freirean Latin American movements and asks: what was the legacy of the older popular education movements? It concludes with an assessment of the current direction of higher education made by Slavoj Zizek, as ‘producers of expert knowledge’ and compares it with the ‘Popular Universities’ that have emerged in Venezuela in the last decade.