ABSTRACT
The People’s Schools emerged at the moment when the population discovered, after participating in the literacy classes, that the methods used in the centres were different from the methods used in the formal school system. The liberation struggle itself had brought forward different needs and expectations for literacy and popular education. Discussions about education in the liberated areas have tended to reduce education to the embryonic forms of state-sponsored schooling. The village meeting as educational forum set in motion a critical discourse that relocated the peasants’ position of subordination. In many respects teacher-education programs have simply not given teachers the conceptual tools they need in order to view knowledge as problematic, as a historically conditioned, socially constructed phenomenon. Similarly, the objectification of knowledge is usually accompanied by the objectification of the classroom social encounter.
