Education as a transformating technology: Trans-historical comparative analysis of the presence of John Dewey in Ibero-America at the beginning of the twentieth century with the popular education movement of the 1970s and Paulo Freire’s influence

Abstract

This is a comparative trans-historic analysis of two cases representing different projects to transform Latin American social and political reality. The paper examines the educational and political discourse of the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America, a Protestant interdenominational committee based in New York, and compares it with the understanding of popular education and its political dimension by popular educator leaders in the 1970s and early 1980s. The Committee’s project aimed at redeeming Latin American peoples and generating a new society based on an imported liberal protestant notion of democracy (spiritualized) while popular education emerged from a counter-hegemonic educational praxis in which the grassroots had a central place. The readings of John Dewey in the case of the Committee and of Paulo Freire in the case of popular education are explored to analyze the political and configurational weaving of practices and ideas.