A History of Popular Education

Educating the People of the World

Sjaak Braster, Frank Simon, Ian Grosvenor, Sjaak Braster, Frank Simon, Ian Grosvenor

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415834452
• eBook ISBN: 9781317849940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Popular Education is a concept with many meanings. With the rise of national systems of education at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, it was related to the socially inclusive concept of citizenship coined by privileged members with vested interests in the urban society that could only be achieved by educating the common people, or in other words, the uncontrollable masses that had nothing to lose. In the twentieth-century, Popular Education became another word for initiatives taken by religious and socialist groups for educating working-class adults, and women. However, in the course of the twentieth-century, the meaning of the term shifted towards empowerment and the education of the oppressed. This book explores the several ways in which Popular Education has been theoretically and empirically defined, in several regions of the world, over the last three centuries. It is the result of work by scholars from Europe and the Americas during the 31st session of the International Standing Conference on the History of Education (ISCHE) that was organised at Utrecht University, the Netherlands in August 2009.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Paedagogica Historica.

The concept of popular education revisited – or what do we talk about when we speak of popular education

Alejandro Tiana Ferrer

Department of History of Education and Comparative Education, UNED, Madrid, Spain

The history of popular education is a long-standing field of research. Its beginnings trace back at least to the mid-twentieth century and it maintains its attractiveness for many researchers, both historians and educators. But, using the same label, quite different lines of research have been developed. They correspond to different ideas about what has to be considered as popular education. The paper starts by revising some of the outstanding works and authors in this field, analysing the main terms used and their underlying concepts. Popular education is then confronted with other close concepts, such as people education, popular or working-class self-education, adult education, women’s education or social education. The author argues that the approach and perspective adopted for identifying a popular education subject of research are more determinant factors than an a priori thematic demarcation. From this point of view, popular education is centred on the study of education activities and school provision addressed to the lower classes and individuals taking part in them. This social origin and position of the public and not of the providers is what really defines this field of study.

In 1987, a colloquium on popular education and culture was held in Madrid, organised by the Spanish Open University (UNED) and Casa de Velázquez, a French cultural institution based in Madrid. The subject of the meeting – Popular Classes, Education and Culture, 19th and 20th Centuries – openly expressed the intention of promoting dialogue among French and Spanish scholars cultivating different but interconnected fields like social history, the history of literature and culture or the history of education.¹ It was not usual at that time for historians coming from different departments and specialities to meet for the purpose of sharing ongoing or completed research projects and confronting views and perspectives on their overlapping fields.

That endeavour was possible thanks to the fact that a number of contacts had already been established in the preceding years. On the one hand, the influential colloquia held during the 1970s in Pau (France) thanks to the effort of Prof. Manuel Tuñón de Lara represented a unique occasion for creating a common French–Spanish school of social history and for establishing strong links among a significant group of then young historians and shortly afterwards relevant professors in both countries.² As a result of these activities, an important group of French and Spanish social historians interested in the sociocultural history of popular classes started to work closely, meeting frequently and sharing their projects.

On the other hand, from the second half of the 1970s a new interest appeared among young historians of education in approaching the then so-called social history of education, whose main novelty was putting the social implications and effects of education into focus, instead of only searching for pedagogical ideas and educational institutions. Some influential papers acted as a manifesto for introducing new perspectives and subjects into a traditional field.³ One of the consequences of this eagerness was that historians of education started to approach social historians and to establish previously non-existing or very limited links with them.

The interest of such a story is that the meeting in 1987 exemplifies the kind of developments influencing the research on the history of popular education in countries such as Spain or France almost 20 years ago. It represented for some then young historians of education the opportunity to look at popular education from a broader perspective. If their predecessors usually tended to see their subjects from a strictly educational view, the confrontation with other approaches helped them to open up the focus. As a result, research on the history of popular education not only concentrated on studying specific institutions, agents or ideas, but embedded such work into a broader sociohistorical perspective.

The history of popular education: a longstanding field of research

By that date, in the late 1980s, historiography of popular education had made a long journey since its beginnings. Even though it had not been a prevalent subject for educational research, a number of relevant books and papers had already appeared in different countries, paving the way for further study and research in the field. Let me refer here to a selection of publications appeared in several European countries addressing popular education as a general field and covering a multiplicity of initiatives and experiences.

As early as in 1964 Benigno Cacérès published his well-known Histoire de l’éducation populaire.⁴ The first sentence opening the book stated that “the history of popular education is inscribed between the Condorcet report to the Convention in 1792 and the current notion of permanent education”.⁵

Starting with a brief analysis of the Condorcet proposals for making education universal, reaching all persons of all ages, the book studied in nine chapters the main developments concerning the education of the popular classes from 1830 to 1944. The agenda for research in this field was almost set in those pages: evening and Sunday classes for adults, vocational training in non-formal courses, initiatives from bourgeois associations for instructing working men – like the Association polytechnique or the Ligue de l’Enseignement – popular libraries, inter-class activities promoted by popular universities, educational initiatives developed by social Catholic organisations – such as Le Sillon – education in trade unions or working-class political associations, leisure activities for the masses – for example music, arts or sports – or the new initiatives adopted by the State after the end of the Second World War. The book ended with a chapter exploring how the future of popular education could look after the 1950s and what the new demands and needs were at that time, with the expressive title “Towards the union of People and Culture?”.

Although not trying to set a closed and clearly bounded agenda, the pioneer work from Cacérès may well be considered as one of the outstanding landmarks in the modern history of popular education. In any case, one should not forget that the designation of such a type of activities as popular education was deeply rooted in French history. In fact, Ferdinand Buisson had already published in 1896 a thorough, firsthand report on adult education in England, referred to as adult popular education, which was translated into other languages and widely distributed in Europe.⁶ Edouard Petit, chief inspector of public instruction, presented in the years at the turn of the century a number of annual reports on popular education and a number of high-ranking officials at the Ministry of Public Instruction followed the same orientation at the beginning of the twentieth century, contributing to the dissemination of the use of the term in France after the Third Republic.

With a narrower scope in time, Geneviève Poujol in 1981 published a new book on the history of popular education in France.⁷ In this case she started by studying the initiatives launched in the first half of the nineteenth century, then devoted two central chapters to the educational activities promoted respectively by laymen and Catholic associations, analysing them into the frame of their social worries and fears – the so-called social question – and ended by tracing a balance in terms of the situation of popular education at the beginning of twentieth century. The main difference with Cacérès’s approach was not only the period of time considered, which was much shorter, but in particular the different concept of popular education adopted.

In fact, Poujol did not present an explicit and comprehensive definition of the concept of popular education, even though the term appears in the title of her book. But in its first chapter she includes a section for analysing the relationships between the so-called working-class movement and the popular education one. She explicitly speaks about two separate movements with a parallel evolution and even includes a table setting out the main chronological landmarks of both.⁸ One might think that this is just rhetoric or an analytical tool for studying the existing connections among them, but in the final paragraph of that section she clearly states that the second example has to be considered:

a movement encouraged by some members of the new classes that, being aware of the raising of the working-class movement, try to achieve a rapprochement of classes, but addressing working men as individuals and not the working class as a whole.⁹

She really refers to two different and parallel movements originating from the same causes: the industrial revolution and its subsequent social class restructuring. From this point of view, popular education does not include, as in Cacérès’s work, specific working-class self-education initiatives, which could be seen even as rivals to popular education ones. I will come later on to that point.

In 1983 a third general history of popular education in France was published, in this case by Antoine Léon, a well-known French historian of education.¹⁰ The scope of his book is similar to that of Cacérès, covering from the French Revolution and some earlier antecedents to post-Second World War. Even within the same time frame, the organisation of both works is nevertheless clearly different. Léon’s outstanding contribution relates to two complementary aspects: on the one hand, he offers a larger set of quantitative data and references; on the other hand, he goes into a detailed description of the internal life and style of action of those initiatives. Almost 20 years of distance of the book from the volume by Cacérès allowed him to have access to wider and newer sources.

The picture depicted in the book is really detailed and convincing. It includes for instance a specific chapter on working-class initiatives for collective self-education, and another on the emergence of activities oriented towards leisure education. He soundly analyses the three main directions adopted by popular education: (a) completing or replacing a non-existent or inappropriate elementary instruction; (b) offering professional training for non-qualified workers; and (c) developing human values and capacities with a view to building a more rational society, however it would be defined. He introduces and applies a concept already in use among social historians, that of popular demand for education, putting the emphasis not only on the offer side, but on demand. One of his main focuses of interest is to analyse developments from the first initiatives of adult education in history, in the form of evening classes, Sunday schools or public lectures, to the contemporary perspectives of permanent education. Taking his long experience as a researcher on adult education and the modern forms of sociocultural awakening as a basis, he ends his book by reflecting on the plausible future of popular education in societies very distant from those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The interest in the study of the history of popular education was also noticeable early on in England. In 1970 David Wardle published a small book with that purpose, which was also distributed outside the United Kingdom.¹¹ One could well argue that it was not the first modern work dedicated to the education of the popular classes, as Brian Simon started to publish in 1960 his outstanding series with the generic title of Studies in the History of Education, which included much relevant information and analyses of different forms of and initiatives in working-class education.¹² But despite being so accurate, Simon’s well-known work cannot be understood as a comprehensive history of British popular education. There is no doubt about Simon’s contribution to the history of British education, but his books do not fall under the focus of this analysis.

Wardle adopted a rather strange approach to studying the history of popular education. If one looks into its contents, the book does not cover a set of initiatives comparable with the French ones. But it does not mean that both historical experiences were so different. For example, both countries set in place a number of adult education and Sunday classes, paid attention to working men’s education promoted by bourgeois associations, witnessed how religious organisations and churches – whether Catholic, Anglican or dissenters – tried to attract and educate the poor and so on. The difference is that Wardle does not define popular education as the combination of such initiatives, but defines it in a different way.

Even though he does not make explicit the concept he uses, his book offers an analysis of the development of a State, universal system of education, elementary first and secondary thereafter, to educate the people, understanding this last term as the lower classes of society. This is why he attentively explores how the idea of offering education to the children of the working classes expanded in the nineteenth century and was translated into initiatives, or why he studies what arrangements were made to organise such an offer through central and local authorities and how the earlier interest in offering elementary education evolved until the establishment of comprehensive secondary education, as well as the conflicts associated with those changes. One cannot blame him for using an excessively large concept of popular education as people education – that is, the education of every single individual in a society. He is interested in studying how the initial resistances and barriers against the incorporation of lower-class children to education were overcome and how the idea of suitable instruction for them was enlarged. From this point of view, he is really interested in the expansion of education to the popular classes, but not so much in other non-formal, vocational or cultural initiatives for adult workers. His concept of popular education should not be rejected as wrong, but it is very narrow.

Some years later, in 1979, the British History of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The people, the poor, and the oppressed: the concept of popular education through time
• 1. The concept of popular education revisited – or what do we talk about when we speak of popular education
• 2. Popular education and the logics of schooling
• 3. La Genese du concept d’éducation publique au Portugal et au Brésil
• 4. Schooling as a means of popular education: Pestalozzi’s method as a popular education experiment
• 5. Education of poor children as an answer to a social and economic crisis: Dutch local government policies in the eighteenth century
• 6. Poverty, education and gender: pedagogic transformations in the schools for the poor (Armenschulwesen) in Hamburg, 1788–1871
• 7. Popular education – rights and duties: school reforms in the Sardinian Kingdom between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• 8. Popular education and republican ideals: the Portuguese lay missions in colonial Africa, 1917–1927
• 9. Nursery schools for the few or the many? Childhood, education and the State in mid-twentieth-century England
• 10. “I promised them that I would tell England about them”: a woman teacher activist’s life in popular humanitarian education
• 11. The American role in education in the Middle East: ideology and experiment, 1920–1940
• 12. The New Education Fellowship and UNESCO’s programme of fundamental education
• 13. The Educational Missions under the Second Republic in Spain (1931–1936): a framework for popular education
• 14. Exploring new concepts of popular education: politics, religion and citizenship in the suburban schools of Madrid, 1940–1975
• Index