Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerilla War in El Salvador

Amazon.com Price: $23.95 (as of 06/05/2019 01:52 PST- Details)

Description

Popular education played a very important role within the twelve-year guerrilla war against the Salvadoran government. Fighting to Learn is a study of its pedagogy and politics. Inspired by Paulo Freire’s literacy work in Brazil within the 1950s, popular education brought literacy to poor rural communities abandoned by the official education system and to peasant combatants within the guerrilla army. People who had little education taught People who had none. Popular education taught people skills, raised the morale that sustained them in unequal combat, and stimulated the creation of an organizational network to carry them together.

Hammond interviewed more than 100 Salvadoran students and teachers for this book. He recounts their experiences in their very own words, vividly conveying how they coped with the hardships of war and organized civilian communities politically to make stronger a guerrilla insurgency. Fighting to Learn tells how poorly educated peasants overcame their sense of inferiority to discover that they might teach every other and work together in a common struggle.

First examining the Christian base communities wherein popular education came to El Salvador, Hammond then discusses how guerrilla combatants, political prisoners, and refugees learned. He shows that education was once both a pedagogical and a political practice: he discusses the training of completely inexperienced teachers, the linking of basic literacy skills with politics, and the organizing of communities. Fighting to Learn offers both a detailed account of an historical moment and a broad theoretical discussion of the relationship between education, community organizing, and the political process.

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » Central America » El Salvador » Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerilla War in El Salvador

Recent Products