Educación para la “redención del campesinado” colombiano : experiencias en los marcos de actuación de acción cultural popular entre los años 1947 y 1975

Abstract

Radio Sutatenza gave life to Popular Cultural Action, a Catholic organization, whose objective was Christian Integral Fundamental Education in the Colombian countryside. In order to reach the most affected populations of the Colombian geography, he made combined use of various means of communication in the development of his educational project: radio, newspaper, primers, correspondence, books, records, and he recruited peasants as volunteers and officials who allowed him a direct contact with the communities, through the Radio Schools. The objective of this research is to understand the experiences of peasants in the framework of action of this educational proposal. Frames that reveal a commitment to cultural transformation, inscribed in a particular way of understanding culture, communication and rural education. The time cut is demarcated by the year of birth of the institution (1947) and covers the period up to 1975, at which time a process of decline begins that would lead to the closure of its operations in 1989. Various institutional documents related to the institution are used as sources to the realization of the proposal, in addition to studies and evaluations on it. The newspaper El Campesino (official publication of the institution) and the correspondence archive of users and leaders are also used. The research links "history of ordinary people" (HOBSBAWM, 2013), with institutional history, seeking to make visible the interactions between peasants and the educational commitment of ACPO. At the base of the proposal, in dialogue with international organizations and developmentalist logics, is the following statement: the backwardness and underdevelopment of the subaltern classes is in their ignorance, illiteracy and passive attitude and mentality. Under this premise, education is presented as a "redemptive" tool, capable of leading people to development. The initial training process recognized as a nerve center "the change in the peasant's mentality", which translates into the transformation of customs, which made the peasant a being "anchored to the past", "passive", "ignorant", " poor” and “underdeveloped”. This transformation is placed not only as prior, but as more important than any transformation of a political or economic nature. Based on the sources and in dialogue with the studies of Raymond Williams (2001, 2003), it is stated that in ACPO there is a search for the transformation of the nature of the social relationship, going from a life in community with others and the other, without the need for individual differentiation, for an individualistic logic that exalts personal development, through the promotion of an “improvement ethic”. As results of the analysis, from a dialectical perspective of the proposal and the peasant experiences in its action frameworks, both the search for the denial of customs and the inferiorization of peasant ways of inhabiting the world are recognized, as well as the way of sustaining a type of education marked by the expectation of moral tutelage, as well as the fact of offering educational alternatives that allow expanding the horizon of possibilities, the field of experiences for a geographically isolated population.