What do youth and cultural centers, youth hostels and scouting have in common? Each of these movements or associations is linked to what is called popular education, which intends to improve the functioning of society without the support of traditional institutions.
But how can this non-school educational process be defined more precisely? Popular education has a specific history, principles and practices. What does it represent today? How can it be a real innovative political and educational project in the 21st century?e century?
Knowledge to emancipate
Popular education historians highlight the vagueness of its definition scientifically, while affirming its importance to understand our educational history. Is it just an approach aimed at giving the greatest number of people the opportunity to access knowledge? Popular education is much more than that.
At the same time an element of permanent education, lifelong training, with the ambition of an education accessible to all, it can be defined as a desire for individual and collective emancipation from active and concrete practices.
Providing everyone with access to knowledge and skills in order to emancipate themselves and transform society is an ideal that emerged from the French Revolution. But, it is at the beginning of the XIXe century, with the rise of industrial and capitalist society, that the ambition for the education of the people and the emancipation of the workers is taking shape.
This nascent popular education has multiple forms. The republican current, by creating, in 1866, the education league, think of the supervision of young people outside school time, even before the development of secular and compulsory school.
The workers’ union movement proposes around labor exchanges and popular universities, a political training of workers. For their part, the Christian currents founded their own associations of popular education in the image of the Christian workers’ youth (JOC) and the Catholic agricultural youth (JAC).
A golden age?
The rise of popular education can be seen from the creation of paid vacations in 1936 and the progressive policy of the Popular Front implemented by the Minister of National Education Jean Zay and by the Secretary of State for youth and sports Léo Lagrange.
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It was the start of popular education with the creation of Cemea (Training centers for active education methods) in 1937 and multiple associations of camp, spaces for educating and socializing young people. The movement continued at the Liberation with the creation of the National Federation of Francas (Mouvement des Francs et Franches Comarades) and the creation of Youth and Culture Houses (MJC) which perpetuate and amplify this popular education of access to culture and knowledge for all.
At the same time, popular education s’institutionnalise. In 1953, the national institute of youth and popular education (INJEP) federates the various movements and an official statute of professional animator is created. While perpetuating itself, popular education seems to lose sight of its emancipatory character from the social point of view by confining itself to the socio-cultural domain.
New areas of action?
In 1998, the creation of Attac illustrated this return to a political conception of popular education. Social damage still exacerbated by the current health crisis require, more than ever, an awareness of the growing inequalities in our society and the worsening of poverty in France.
ATD Fourth World or Emmaüs, to name just these two emblematic associations, have actively participated for decades in the fight against social inequalities through popular education and training actions.
Should we therefore see it, as a report of the Economic and Social Council of May 2019, a “modern and pioneering concept” and a “permanent laboratory for innovation and active methods”? Because today we are witnessing a renewal, a bifurcation specifies the sociologist Christian Maurel, or perhaps a return to the very sources of popular education.
Indeed, in May 2021, the note from the Injep on the popular education factory specifies the multiple possible fields of intervention of popular education in the XXIe century: lifelong education, popular universities, but also support for urban policy measures, struggles against inequalities or all forms of discrimination.
Popular education is anchored in all areas and represents an educational lever for all social categories and all generations, just like the work of Federation of social centers on aging.
A social project in the 21st century
Because of its history, popular education has its pedagogical figures, like Fernand Oury or Gisèle de Failly. It also has its own pedagogies such as that of decision – “allowing individuals to decide what concerns them” – the social pedagogy, theorized in France in particular by Laurent Ott, or the critical pedagogies inspired by the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire.
The presence of Philippe Meirieu, a big name in education, to the national presidency of Cemea is in this respect a symbol of this reaffirmation that education can be at the heart of a social project.
But the vigor of popular education is also in this link between active methods and political education stressing this need to rethink a living democracy where all inhabitants have a place, can act and influence decisions.
The fields of action of popular education in the XXIe centuries are therefore innumerable. The desire to create activities of direct democracy, specific forms of public expression such as gesticulated conferences or new educational spaces, like the adventure playgrounds which redesign the place of children in the city are just a few examples of this educational and political dynamism.
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