Latin American Adult Education Movements: "Humanistic" Versus "Structural" Approach

Abstract

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 reifled, 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 realism6no longer emphasizes its "scienttftctty," which had

disabled people's emotional and realistic suffering in the name of "scientific knowledge and rigorousness."