The Educational Philosophy of Luis Emilio Recabarren: Pioneering Working Class Education in Latin America

Abstract

<p>In Liam Kane's (2001) account of the work of Latin American popular education since the 1950s and 1960s, he briefly noted this movement's deep roots in an earlier history, including the workers education movement in Chile, 1890 to 1920. María Alicia Rueda, herself a Chilean, has now provided the first extended treatment in English of this earlier period, through a detailed study of the life and work of Luis Emilio Recabarren, a Chilean working-class organic intellectual of the late 19th and early 20th century. Recabarren was a proponent of what English-speaking adult education historians have called "independent working-class education" (Steele & Taylor, 2004), which was an integral component of the international socialist movement of that time. For many years, the contribution of this independent movement was barely acknowledged in "official" adult education history, in part because its proponents had vehemently opposed liberal university-based adult education, once considered the only "true foundation" of the modern profession. Social movement learning studies, which began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s, are generating renewed interest in earlier more radical versions of adult education, but still this work has been almost entirely Eurocentric and Anglocentric. Rueda's book helps dislodge the English-speaking radical adult educators from the center stage, while at the same time reconnecting contemporary Latin American popular education with its historical roots in the working-class struggles of the early 20th century.</p>