Overview
Folk schools and popular education processes provide opportunities for people most affected by injustice to build skills, participate in democratic learning, and gain tools for organizing.
The practice and principles of popular education really come out of people in oppressed situations trying to make a difference … a way that people can participate with each other to share ideas, come up with strategies, and organize for change.
— Susan Williams, Highlander Center
Liberatory education supports people to build connections, learn freely, and organize to make change in their communities. Examples of liberatory education have arisen around the world out of peoples’ struggles—in the folk schools of Denmark, out of political repression across Latin America, in African liberation struggles, and during the Great Depression in the United States. Two related approaches to liberatory education are the methodology of popular education and the folk school.
The term “popular education”—and its early development in theory and practice—comes from Paulo Freire, a Brazilian intellectual and activist active in the mid-twentieth century. Popular education is a group process that brings people together to share and analyze their experiences, and come up with strategies for change. In the simplest terms, it means people getting together to learn something they need to know. Popular education rejects the system of experts and teachers transferring knowledge to students, only for that knowledge to be regurgitated for an essay or exam. This more rigid system confines even the most creative of teachers, who are held back by standardized curriculums and testing. In popular education, everyone involved is both a teacher and learner.
Folk schools, which originated in Denmark during the nineteenth century, were designed to provide people in rural areas with educational spaces to learn skills relevant to their lives. Inspired by the ideas of Danish poet, thinker, and pastor Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, these schools also taught citizenship skills that aided Denmark’s transition to democracy and encouraged lifelong learning outside of formal educational institutions.
Today, folk schools are located around the world and often provide both educational spaces and living and cultural spaces that allow people to gather and learn from each other, in a spirit akin to popular education. Their missions depend on the needs and culture of their local communities, so they often look and behave very differently from one another. Music and other cultural expressions are often central to how they share stories and raise spirits.
One of the most famous examples of a folk school is the Highlander Research and Education Center, located in New Market, Tennessee, in the United States. Founded in 1932 as the Highlander Folk School, inspired by Denmark Folk Schools, its mission was to “provide an educational center in the South for the training of rural and industrial leaders, and for the conservation and enrichment of the indigenous cultural values of the mountains.” Over the years, it has offered a variety of programs such as supporting labor organizers working across racial lines, civil rights leadership training in the 1960s, and intergenerational workshops. Its location at the intersection of the Appalachian region and the American South has led to a focus on regional issues such as efforts to protect the land from strip-mining and organizing against toxic polluters.
The methodology of popular education is central to Highlander’s approach, and generations of movement leaders in the US South and elsewhere have received training from Highlander to transform how their communities and movements learn and take action together. Interwoven with their commitment to popular education, Highlander practices related methodologies of cultural organizing, integrating community based art and cultural expression into everything they do; participatory action research, in which communities shape the methods and analysis of research that affects them; language justice, so that people can lead changemaking whatever language they speak; and intergenerational organizing. Highlander shares the theory and practice of these methodologies to encourage widespread use.
Highlander hosts community workshops, leadership and fellowship programs, and children’s justice camps. They support liberation struggles like the immigrant justice movement and the Movement for Black Lives. The work of Highlander can also happen in communities far away from Tennessee. One example is Project Upstream, which enabled unhoused people to become fellows in a program where they met, discussed their conditions with other unhoused people, and then worked to bring that information to government officials. The first year, the program identified the need for improving access to restrooms.
Other folk schools may operate differently, with a student demographic that aligns more closely with the ages of traditional university students. It is common for Danish folk schools—more than seventy operate independently throughout the country—to offer on-campus housing as well. But despite differences in target populations and course design, the basic tenets of folk schools remain the same. There are no traditional grades. Learning is rooted in students’ own motivation and interest. By providing a space for popular education, where everyone is an expert on their own life experience, folk schools allow people who experience oppression to gain tools for leadership and making change. Schools that empower their learners create more empowered communities.
