Popular education is increasingly being embraced by the labour movement. But we need to understand popular education as more than a compendium of games, exercises and stimulating forms of delivering a pre-packaged message. The real power of popular education is not its form, but its content. The core content of popular education is critical thinking and empowerment. Of course, we want workers to think critically about the boss, capitalism, and the economy.
Popular education begins with people's own experience.
It gives them the tools to analyze their situation and begin to take action to transform themselves and their condition. For labour educators, popular education helps us generate an assertive, critical thinking, united, workforce which participates in unions as the vital, democratic, collective organizations they need to forge a community of interest among workers in the workplace and for fighting for worker rights and justice in the broader society. That is, we need to understand the difference between education and propaganda. Clever propaganda gives people analytical tools to be used on opponents while it simultaneously reinforces a myth about our own virtues. The clever propagandist doesn't tell outright lies.