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

by John L. Hammond

Popular education played a vital role in 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 in the 1950s, popular education brought literacy to poor rural communities abandoned by the official education system and to peasant combatants in the guerrilla army. Those who had little education taught those 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 hold them together. Hammond interviewed more than 100 Salvadoran students and teachers for this book. He recounts their experiences in their own words, vividly conveying how they coped with the hardships of war and organized civilian communities politically to support a guerrilla insurgency. Fighting to Learn tells how poorly educated peasants overcame their sense of inferiority to discover that they could teach each other and work together in a common struggle. First examining the Christian base communities through which popular education came to El Salvador, Hammond then discusses how guerrilla combatants, political prisoners, and refugees learned. He shows that education was both a pedagogical and a political 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.

Genres: Nonfiction

253 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of articles on the popular education movement in El Salvador throughout the 1980s. Plenty of information on how the insurgent FMLN organized the education and training activities in the areas they controlled, refugee camps and in the popular army. The style is dull and repetitive. The author promotes some elements of the ‘liberal peace’ myth such as there was a stalemate between FMLN and Salvadoran army which led to a balanced peace aggreement in 1992. Very little information about the political content of the trainings.

[Dont · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a remarkable book. I can't recommend this book enough for anyone interesting in the history of popular education, radical pedagogy and community organizing. Over the years I have described to many people how the history of organizing and popular education's role in that history in El Salvador had a profound impact on the politics of Los Angeles as large numbers of community activists fled to the U.S. to escape the persecution of paramilitaries and the rightwing establishment. This book provides an incredibly useful account of that moment from the perspective of the role of literacy and education. Recently, I had the privilege to write a more lengthy annotation for the book as part of an initiative by the London chapter of Ultra-red to compile a radical education curriculum for social movements in London. Below is the text I composed for that curriculum. Perhaps this will be helpful to some of you interesting in exploring further the history and practices of popular education in/as community organizing.

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Based on over one hundred interviews with base teachers, trainers, and campesinos, sociologist John L. Hammond's Fight To Learn provides a detailed survey of the role of popular education in liberation struggles of El Salvador through the 1970s and 1980s leading up to the peace settlement in 1992. Much of the practice of popular education during the civil war drew on the ideas of Paulo Freire. However, the exigencies of rural poverty, mass displacement, genocide, and armed conflict had a specific impact on how those ideas were put into practice. Whereas Freire argued that critical literacy should occur in a pre-revolutionary moment, in El Salvador, popular education became synonymous with organizing communities in the midst of struggle. Popular education retained the pedagogical principles of universal access to learning, education as and towards service to one's community, and literacy as a tool for the poor in their struggle for liberation. The notion that popular education might serve as a practice of political organizing became a prevailing feature in El Salvador.

The struggle against illiteracy was seen as one front in the fight for justice. Hammond underscores the importance of the base or popular teachers in this context. These men and women were nearly entirely volunteers with little more formal education than the campesinos they taught. The popular teachers often spoke of their teaching as a modest contribution to the community. Typically, the popular teachers were recruited because they had had some prior formal schooling. That experience often amounted to a few years of elementary education. After very basic training (training that would continue on a weekly basis), the base teachers entered into the classroom, teaching children by day and adults by night. Regardless of age, the method of education was basically the same. Teachers would begin with a word that had a particular relevance to the people -- ideally, a word that contained all five vowels. In settings monitors by the Salvadoran army, the base teachers had to carefully select words that could not be seen as a direct threat. Sometimes the teachers introduced the words through a drawing in a grammar book. Occasionally, the grammar book was itself the result of an extensive participatory process involving base teachers and communities. The participants would then discuss the relevance of the word for their lives. After extensive group dialogue, the teacher would then lead the pupils to recite all the phonetic possibilities building on the vowel sounds in the word -- a practice developed from Freire's literacy method.

Hammond provides detailed description of the numerous situations where popular education occurred; Honduran refugee camps, internal displacement camps in the cities, re-populated areas, guerrilla units and in the prisons. He also discusses the role of popular education in the training and organization of community health programs. But in all instances, the use of popular education remained the practice of very poor, barely educated and volunteer campesinos. While situated within a larger revolutionary moment, the base teachers remained the backbone of the massive literacy campaign. Late in the book, Hammond makes a passing observation that while the NGOs, clergy, and cadres described popular education in abstract concepts like participation, the base teachers themselves spoke about its practical aspects. Thus, terms such as "participation" marked one's distance from the concrete scene and experience of education in the base communities.