The adult education enterprise derives its legitimacy and value from the social and economic purposes which it serves. Human Resource Development, for example, can only be understood in relation to productivity and the demands of unfettered markets which it supports. Strings are attached to such funding, as the saying goes, but fortunately the ties between program and funding resource are explicit and intended.
Popular education is a different case altogether.
As with other forms of adult education, it too derives its value from the broader social agenda which it serves. But that agenda is democratic social change. The aim of popular education is not adaptation to the demands of the workplace, but to reclaim work and the fruits of labor as a right. The aim of popular education is not facility with words, but a voice. In the United States, practitioners of popular education are principally those working in poor and working class neighborhoods.