Argentina: The debate between lifelong and popular education in adult education

Abstract

This chapter explores the tension produced between the concepts of lifelong education and popular education in Argentina when the National Adult Education Department (Dirección Nacional de Educación del Adulto or DINEA in Spanish) was created in 1968, during a period of consecutive coups d’etat. The use of these concepts is discussed taking into account that the struggle over signification, that is, the production of signifieds, is one of the forms of struggle for hegemony. At a specific moment in which the Western nations were reconsidering their school systems, Argentina’s military government appropriated lifelong education in order to propose a way of modernizing the adult system (In Argentina, the adult system has been a subsystem of the national education system since the beginnings of the twentieth century) and legitimizing the educational reforms being fostered, without producing any significant transformations of the status quo. Simultaneously, alternative educational practices inspired by Paulo Freire’s theoretical framework were being carried out by several social movements, which articulated them to their resistance to the dictatorships in power.