Acknowledgment and popular education: a democratic-republican perspective

The present article addresses the controversial relationship between Popular Education and the democratic republican State. An education which, by being gestated, sponsored and oriented by the legal frameworks of this State, would also be destined to subvert it, once it is committed to the demands from excluded sectors of society and is legitimated under the aegis of the same conditions that have forged it. In view of this, we seek to identify the ambivalent democratic-republican origin of Popular Education and also verify to what extent this type of education can be conceived as an explicit manifestation of the struggle for acknowledgment, whose possible equation happens with the socio-historical dynamism of the republican democracies. This acknowledgment, in order to constitute itself reciprocally and thus transcend the mere unilaterality, asymmetry and instrumentality, needs to presuppose the radicality of the dialogue.