Education and other modes of thinking in Latin America

If the production of knowledge in Latin America has long been subject to imperial designs and disseminated through educational systems, recent interventions—from liberation theology, popular education, participatory action research, alternative communication and critical literacy to postcolonial critique and decolonial options—have sought to shift the geography of reason. The central question to be addressed is how, in times of historical ruptures, political reconstructions and epistemic formations, the production of paradigms rooted in ‘other’ logics, cosmologies and realities may renegotiate and redefine concepts of education, learning and knowledge.

Latin America has changed face. After the long years of military dictatorships, civil wars and economic instability, diverse academic commentators now stress that the region has become the foremost site in the world of counter-hegemonic processes. According to these scholars, such local acts of resistance are loaded with the potential for radically challenging the existing economic and financial order controlled by the ‘West’ (cf. Escobar, 2010; Guardiola-Rivera, 2010). In Latin America, exposure to some of the harshest and most unjust consequences of the global economy dates back as long ago as to when the region was first included in European maps and spans centuries: from the emergence of a new global division of commerce—from merchandise to human cargo—that saw both Latin America and Africa stripped of memories, exuberance and manpower to the neoliberal recipes imposed on the region up until the end of the twentieth century by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Aman, 2015).

Over the last decades, however, several Latin American communities, in different parts of the region, have countered this movement by forming some of the most dynamic and organized forms of resistance: from the landless movements in Brazil to the Zapatistas in the Chiapas region of Mexico, from the indigenous social movements in Bolivia to Venezuela’s Chavistas, to mention but a few. At the same time, diverse Latin American countries have given birth to and nurtured a truly endogenous educational approach which has become known as popular education. In many cases, the movements of resistance have developed their own particular brand of popular education as an expression of counter-hegemonic resilience, which has also in some cases been accompanied by expressions of the liberation theology movement engendered by the Catholic Church.

Not least, these counter-hegemonic events have generated a new vocabulary. ‘Plurinationality’, ‘interculturality’, ‘direct and substantive democracy’, or even socialismo del siglo XXI (‘socialism of the twenty-first century’) and revolución ciudadana (‘citizen revolution’) are only a few of the many concepts that seek to provide a name to the ongoing events towards post-liberal societies. Subsequently, such notions have also been assimilated by and interacted with educational discourses producing their own specific terminology in which terms such as dialogue, conscientization or critical awareness, praxis, participation, class mediation, empowerment, emancipatory or transformative education are central. In some cases, as for example Nicaragua in the 1980s, such concepts and practices found their way into educational policies on distinct national levels. Perhaps the most evident current example is that of Bolivia where Evo Morales, when elected the nation’s first indigenous president in 2005, went so far as to declare the need to ‘decolonize education’; that is, to emancipate the educational system from western influences. There is also an ongoing and highly polemical discussion in Brazil concerning the approval of a national policy of popular education seen as a method of government articulated with a national policy of social participation (Ireland, 2014).

In mentioning the aforesaid political reforms, a caveat is needed before proceeding. This special issue is not limited to Latin American communities that have formulated radical, local and sustainable alternatives to the global economy with their apparent effects on and interaction with formal and non-formal education. Nor are there any ambitions to make any representational claims for the region in terms of content, focus or scholarship. Rather, as the title suggests, our ambition is to map and present a slice of the various and broad-reaching ways of understanding, approaching and perceiving education within the region. Consequently, the scope of this special issue is on the variety of theorizations, discussions and developments as related to the praxis of education and its scholarship in contemporary Latin America. In other words, if there are any common denominators—the red threads that link the different articles to each other—then we would indicate three. The locus of enunciation; that is, the region from where or about which the authors write. What can be termed popular or in some cases non-formal or counter hegemonic education and the broad concept of learning. The focus of most popular or counter-hegemonic education tends to be on learning rather than teaching.

However, as we deploy a regional concept as part of the title, we are ourselves unavoidably guilty of a broad generalization. Formally (UIS, 2001, p. 6), 19 sovereign states are to be found under the header ‘Latin America’ today covering an area that stretches from the United States’ southern border to the southern tip of South America, including the Caribbean. Given the far-reaching area covered not only in terms of geography, but also of the different peoples inhabiting it, we could ask if it is even relevant to speak of Latin American as if it were a recognized entity that permits such generalizations—and if the answer is affirmative, what is then particularly ‘Latin American’ about Latin America?

A possible route to an answer is through the name itself. The etymology of ‘Latin America’ is a debated issue where the most common view is that the name only emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in the aftermath of the wars of independence. Apparently first used by the Colombian, José María Caicedo in 1856, it was quickly adopted by the French under Napoleon III to provide ideological cover for his imperial and colonial ambitions in the Americas. Accordingly, the shift from Spanish, Hispanic or even Ibero America to Latin opens up the sense of the collective to include also Portuguese and French and in the process reducing the role of Spain in emphasizing that the region comprises those countries where Romance languages are spoken (Eakin, 2004).

Taking one step aback, it needs to be remembered that ‘America’ before it even became ‘Latin’ already had a name. The conquistadores were not only armed with weapons; they also carried with them a new master code that excluded the indigenous populations from collective memory in the process of their inscription onto European maps. In the process, a landmass known as ‘Abya Yala’ (meaning in the Cuna language of Panama ‘land in full maturity’ (Walsh, 2015)) was renamed after one of its European witnesses with the later addition of ‘Latin’ to further emphasize its literal inscription into another sign system. In attempts to reveal the geopolitical perspective from which History—with a capital ‘H’—tends to be written, Eric Wolf (1982) uses ‘People without History’; a metaphor that emphasizes the epistemic power differential that placed both continents and people outside of history before the advent of European eyes to testify to their existence. In this sense, to be part of history is a privilege of European modernity; excluding every society which does not use alphabetic writing or communicates in a vernacular other than the imperial languages of modern Europe. As such, ‘Latin America’ is not only a name, it is also a product that touches upon questions of knowledge and subjectivity. Knowledge in the sense that geographical consciousness has expanded in Europe and the world map has consequently been redrawn, subjectivity because a new identity was emerging (Mignolo, 2005).

In attempting to define a Latin American pedagogy, the Argentinean liberation theologian Enrique Dussel (1980, p. 16) paints the image of a creation on two legs. Split in halves, Latin America is portrayed as the offspring from the fleshly relationship between the conquistador, Hernán Cortés, and the indigenous woman, la Malinche, who, in the words of Dussel, ‘betrays her culture’ (traiciona su cultura). Her alleged treacherous deed lies not merely in giving her body to the imposter, resulting in the birth to the mestizo, but also supplying the Spanish troops with enough information to get the upper hand in what Bartolomé de las Casas would later refer to as ‘the destruction of the Indies’. Mimicking the new masters, appropriating their customs, answering to the honorary doña, negating her indigenousness; for Dussel, this is equally product of the power relation that straddles Cortés and la Malinche. Reading the text allegorically, without denying the highly problematic staging of stereotypical gendering, the protagonists become personifications of the colonial state and the local populations—a conqueror that imposes its order on an indigenous population through direct violence (forced baptism), as well as other more subtle exercises of power (a European educational system replicated in the colonial setting). As ‘fruits of the conquest’, Peruvian author José Carlos Mariátegui (1975, p. 87) writes, the educational systems in the Andean nations have ‘a colonial rather than a national character. When the state refers to the Indians in its educational programs, it treats them as an inferior race’.

Although the majority of Latin American states achieved independence in the 1820s, the republican ideals of equality and fraternity as embraced by revolutionary troops comprised of European descendants in quest for independence, continued to collide with the memories and experiences of the indigenous populations (Vergès, 1999). In other words, independence from Spain had marginal effects on the situation of the indigenous populations—the structures imposed by colonialism were preserved by the ruling Creole elites. Newly born republics replicated the colonial structures in new terms where the very discourse of nationalist unity used for imperial decolonization continued to push the indigenous populations to the margins of society with the continuous enhancement of the colonial difference between modern European idioms (languages of sciences and knowledge) and those of the indigenous populations (languages of religion and culture).

Such internal battles for the indigenous populations are also part of a wider fight against a West-centred outside world, which continues to control much of the global economic system—from the extraction of gas and oil to mining and plantation—that controls the lands where indigenous populations reside. Against such a background of historical injustices that continues to inform the present, a most notable educational reform was enacted as a consequence of the forceful emergence of indigenous people on the political scene in the region with the construction of indigenous universities in Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico that seek to reconquer and upgrade languages and ‘traditional’ knowledge systems of the indigenous populations and, in the process, challenge dominant Western paradigms and scientific theories (Aman, 2014).

Whilst the battle for the minds and souls of the indigenous populations formed part of what could be termed a colonial version of popular education (catechism and basic literacy) during the initial years of the Portuguese and Spanish invasions, the modern concept of popular education which forms the second of those red threads running through this special issue, has a long history before taking on its more contemporary configuration in the fifties and sixties of the past century. In his article in this volume, Streck suggests that thinkers like the sixteenth-century Guaman Poma de Ayala, the seventeenth-century Juana Inés de la Cruz and the nineteenth-century José Martí all contributed to a broad notion of popular education which in the early twentieth century was further elaborated by anarchists, socialists and communists—mainly, at least in Brazil, European immigrant workers— in their search to create pedagogical discourses articulated with the notion of social transformation (Carrillo, 2013). The contemporary concept of popular education is still strongly influenced by the writing and praxis of Paulo Freire, one of the references implicitly or explicitly common to most of the articles in this collection. This contemporary concept dates back to the fifties and sixties when with the example of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 it appeared that Latin America could establish its independence from its colonial and neocolonial past.

Whilst popular education has evolved over the years it has maintained some of its basic tenets like its fundamental class orientation, its emancipatory vision and its central concern with the content and ways in which the indigenous peoples and popular classes produce knowledge, learn and transmit their knowledge. There exists a concern to learn from the reality of those involved in the popular practices, what Walsh in her article translates as ‘asking and walking’. This concern with learning rather than with that teaching which is the mark of formal systems of education is a third thread which unites the majority of the assembled articles. Popular education is concerned with learning from life in order to improve and transform the quality of that life and therefore takes as its content not abstract academic knowledge but practical daily knowledge linked, for example, to the social relations of production in the case of Melo Neto and Da Costa and their article on solidarity economy or culture and the arts as in the case of Baron Cohen or gender and agency as in the case of Stromquist or emotions as with Streck. Learning is about transforming lives and realities, about making another world possible and not about the mere accumulation of knowledge.

A good example of paradigms rooted in other realities and modes of learning is to be found in the school projects, the escuelitas, run by the Zapatistas in rural Chiapas in the south of Mexico that can be characterized as a form of popular adult education. Just as the Zapatistas, for two decades, have rejected hierarchical systems and the capitalist economic system, the escuelita disregard traditional teaching models. Instead of having one single teacher, the school is meant to be an open space of the community to learn together. In an interview, Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesperson for the Zapatista movement, asserted that ‘it is the collective that teaches, that shows, that forms, and in it and through it the person learns, and also teaches’. The roots to this initiative can be traced to the development of the Zapatista movement itself. Communication between the revolutionary army and indigenous communities is stranded in attempts to transfer concepts and thoughts inspired by a Marxist tradition. In Marcos’ (Marcos & Le Bot 1997, p. 63) own words: ‘You have a theoretical scheme that explains the whole of society, then you arrive in a society and find out that the scheme does not explain anything’. Eventually, the Zapatistas came to realize that ‘property’, as in ‘personal possessions’, was a foreign concept for the indigenous communities, without an equivalent in its translated context where land, in contrast to capitalist ideology, is perceived to be unownable—the land belongs to everybody and no one. According to Marcos, mobilization for a proletarian revolution against the national bourgeoisie and federal government could only take off when EZLN adapted their political discourse to invoke indigenous schemes as part of their Marxist spirit. These insights constitute a pedagogical foundation to the escuelitas according to Subcomandante Marcos since students attending these schools are required to shift their perspective on, and understanding of, learning and indigenous communities.

This topic is one of many ingredients about which Catherine Walsh writes as part of this special issue, emphasizing the need for a decolonial pedagogy. Revisiting the works of Freire, Walsh mixes autobiographical accounts from the Andes and a visit to the abovementioned escuelita in Chiapas after an invitation from Subcomandante Marcos. As she describes her own processes of ‘unlearning’; that is, a shift that opens up for other ways of being, thinking and knowing beyond universality of capitalism, euro-centred modernity and western civilization. For Walsh, pedagogy must be understood in relation to its socio-political context, where a decolonial pedagogy which allows knowledge systems that have been colonized and delegitimized to coexist—to recognize Abya Yala alongside Latin America.

Walsh’s article is followed by that of Carlos Alberto Torres who as one of the writers for UNESCO’s first Global Report on Adult Learning and Education (GRALE) had access to more than 200 national reports on which the GRALE was in part based. As a result of his analysis he is led to believe that there exists a dominant technocratic thinking in what he calls ‘adult learning education’ which is difficult to challenge since although it claims not to be political it is indeed ‘insidiously political’. His article presents some of the conclusions resulting from the analysis of the government reports and other key UNESCO documents and concludes with a meta-theoretical analysis of some implications of this technocratic thinking in adult education. In this regard it is pertinent to recall his conclusion that where adult education is an instrument of state policies it tends to neglect emancipatory practices that may empower learners or communities. In that sense, it represents the flip side of popular education.

The theme of popular education is taken up again by Streck, Melo Neto and Da Costa with very different approaches. The first investigates emotions in the history of Latin American popular education, while Melo Neto and Da Costa analyse the relation between popular education as a pedagogy with its own specific methodologies and solidarity economy understood as sustainable, socially fair development which seeks to foster practices of social collaboration rather than strengthening the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few. Streck sets out to identify the presence of emotions—as historical and cultural expressions that mark societies and education—in the historical constitution of popular education in the Latin American continent and in so doing contributing to the understanding of popular education as a thinking–feeling practice. Within popular education practice, he emphasizes the role given to the mística which expresses the part played by human emotions as an integral part of that pedagogy and which at the same time contributes to understanding the complex relation between rationality and emotions in education. In so doing, Streck characterizes popular education as a thinking–feeling practice, that is a pedagogic process in which thinking and feelings or emotions are intrinsically interlinked.

Whilst Streck is concerned with emotions, Melo Neto and Da Costa’s concern is to analyse the contribution of popular solidarity economy as an alternative to existing models of exploitative social organization and productive relationships oriented by the desire to establish different relations between human beings and between humankind and nature. On the one hand, a change in the relations of production requires a set of new economic relations among producers and on the other, these new production processes have to be nurtured and incubated which requires a new educational foundation with its own pedagogical requirements and methodology based on a clear understanding of categories such as culture, labour, pedagogy, popular and popular incubator in the context of incubation in solidarity enterprises. Hence, it is an educational process that is constantly renewing itself taking as its starting point the very reality in which it is immersed and which it seeks to transform.

The focus of Stromquist’s article is on gender and women’s agency. Without denying the importance of state-run more formal schooling and education and its potential for transformation, she suggests that the WNGOs play an important role as educational institutions that both create and disseminate knowledge about gender inequalities and gender justice and also act as an alternative to participation in formal political structures. In both cases, the WNGOs contribute to foster the formation of assertive individual and collective identities that subsequently influence the public arena through their advocacy of measures to reduce inequalities between women and men. Despite employing descriptive categories like non-formal education, informal learning and women’s adult education the orientation and pedagogy of such activities is very much in line with the predominant category of popular education. In order to effect change, new knowledge has to be created by the very groups that seek to alter the disadvantageous conditions that confront them and new pedagogies invented for transmitting that new knowledge. It is the relative freedom of NFE which makes it an indispensable vehicle for the creation of new identities and the diffusion of counter-hegemonic knowledge.

Questions of identity and subjectivity are also central in the article of Colombian-based historian Roberto Sancho Larrañaga who has identified a certain shift in educational policies over the last decade. Employability, or the quality of being eligible for the labour market, has become predominant to educational systems in different corners of the world. Instead of speaking about a shortage of employment and describing people as employed or unemployed, one now speaks about a lack of employability and the student has come to be described as employable or not employable, or in need of employability skills. While the focal point of the article is Colombia, what Sancho Larrañaga sets out to discuss is a larger pattern as education has been increasingly standardized across national borders—not least apparent in the case of Europe with the Bologna Process. As part of its critique, the article goes on to question the ways in which educational systems are required to produce students with the necessary skills and knowledge that makes them employable, which, in effect, limits the designs of curricula to the demands of the labour market.

The concluding article in this special issue is written by a community-based art educator and cultural activist, Dan Baron Cohen, who lives and works in the state of Para in the north of Brazil where he coordinates the Rivers of Meeting Project as part of the Community University of the Rivers. Making use of narrative descriptions of different cultural moments, in the life of the Afro-Amazonian riverside community of Cabelo Seco, infused with human tragedy and drama, Baron Cohen weaves his own pedagogical vision of the potential and limits of arts for transforming the local community—transformance. His text is in essence an enactment of decolonial pedagogy with all its contradictions, ambiguities and richness which takes us back to Catherine Walsh’s concept of ‘walking and learning’. It is pedagogy as it unrolls in practice based on community dialogue mediated by culture as an act of resistance to the destructive power of the dehumanizing marauding industrialization of the river communities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Aman

Robert Aman is a postdoctoral research fellow at Linköping University, Sweden and a scholar in residence at Sciences Po, Paris. A former visiting fellow with the Program in Literature at Duke University and at the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, he recently finalized his dissertation Impossible Interculturality?: Education and the Colonial Difference in a Multicultural World published by Linköping University Press. He is a coeditor of the interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy & Politics. He has recently published in peer-reviewed journals such as Cultural Studies, British Educational Research Journal, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, and Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Timothy Ireland

Timothy Ireland is associate professor at the Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil, where he teaches on the postgraduate programmes in Education and in Human Rights and is the current Director of the UNESCO Chair in Youth and Adult Education.