There are many contradictions in the simple title question of this article. And hurricanes are announced by a wee breeze. And as i write these words i am doing just that. Here i share some of my own experience of popular education and my wrestling with critical questions. This is my contribution to what i hope is a dialogue, helping you to pose some generative questions about your own educational practice and persuading you that popular education as i know it has something to offer you.
Popular education is a constantly changing and growing process that has roots in many countries.
It has grown out of struggles to name and resist oppression as experienced by people who learn that they are oppressed. The term 'popular education' is little more than 40 years old and it has come to characterize a set of principles that many educators engaged in social struggle share. Each of these characteristics can be seen as an opening to deal with all the others, though i will exercise some limits for the sake of brevity. This has been for me one of the most challenging principles of popular education work. At its worst my high school had over 4000 students crammed into a building built for 2000.