Reviews
Amazon Journal: Dispatches From a Vanishing Frontier by Geoffrey O'Connor, E.P. Dutton, 1997, 378 pp., $25.95 (cloth), and Plume, 1998, 378 pp. $13.95 (paper). This is a highly personal...
...As one would expect, development brought disease and destruction to the people of the Amazon, as well as to the rain forest itself...
...A visually evocative narrative draws the reader into the struggle over land rights and development in Brazil's rain forest...
...Nor do we know the extent to which popular education is in practice now that El Salvador is in a period of relative peace...
...First, Hammond examines how it was possible for a people to take on the burden and responsibility of educating in the midst of a war...
...The book is highly engrossing for its unusual perspective...
...While creating his documentary film, also called Amazon Journal, O'Connor visited the region extensively...
...Since the goals of popular education were not only to teach specific skills but also to raise political awareness and social consciousness, it is understandable that "success" would be difficult to quantify...
...Hammond then examines the sites where popular education was practiced during the years of the war in El Salvador-the front lines, prisons, liberated zones and refugee camps...
...Hammond differentiates between traditional philosophies of education and popular education...
...Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador by John L. Hammond, Rutgers University Press, 1998, 253 pp., $20.00 (paper...
...His documentary will be running on PBS stations nationwide through this November and December...
...In other words, popular education "assumes that knowledge is relational and that for one to know something effectively it must relate to one's prior knowledge or grow out of one's experience...
...Third, Hammond's self-reflection and self-critique demonstrate his personal integrity and honesty, and serve to enhance the readers' understanding of the specific circumstances of popular education in El Salvador, and its applicability to education generally...
...They have always been 'inside'inside the structure that made them 'beings for others.' The solution is not to 'integrate' them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become beings for themselves...
...The oppressed are not marginals," wrote Brazilian educator Paolo Freire in the early 1970s...
...What he discovered as he spent time with the cast of characters that make up this story-heroic resistance activists, socially committed clergy, corrupt power brokers and the bizarre media surrounding the save-the-rain-forest movement-is presented as being both humbling and haunting...
...The latter, which is based on "knowledge derived from personal experience," necessarily involves active learning and "tries to create a nurturing environment to stimulate students' desire to learn...
...Hammond admits that he can't tell us the numbers of individuals who became literate or the educational levels or skills achieved...
...This is a highly personal account of a filmmaker's journey into the Amazon to record the gold mining rush and its effects on the region...
...Instead, we are presented with the testimonies of popular educators and the individuals who learned from them...
...According to Hammond, the most distinctive feature of the Salvadoran experience of popular education was the integration of education with community life and the close relationship between political organizing and education...
...Freire's educational philosophy with its model of popular education has been adopted and implemented by social reformers and revolutionaries throughout the Americas...
...Since learning was an essential component of the process of liberation, literacy was considered "an obligation to the whole community...
...They are not men living 'outside' society...
...The former has as its fundamental tenet the notion of the knowledgeable person-the expert-who delivers his or her knowledge to a passive listener through a process of theoretical exposition and logical deduction...
...Less well known is the terror produced as mine owners and large landowners tried to increase and maintain control of the region...
...But we also do not know whether the gains made during the war have been sustained, or whether those who became politically active during the war are still active...
...Second, the political consciousness and solidarity with which the research was carried out challenges widely accepted social science tenets regarding requirements of "objectivity" on the part of researchers, and represents a new kind of model for the social sciences...
...The fact that education was a priority during wartime and that it was carried out at all under the most impoverished and difficult of circumstances, should give us all hope about what might be possible in times of peace...
...Fighting to Learn is an important work for educators on three counts...
...As O'Connor relates through personal stories, the terrorism perpetrated by hired guns on indigenous people, rubber tappers, peasants and clergy as they began to organize and resist is one of the particularly brutal and devastating consequences of development in the Amazon...
...Erica G. Polakoff...
...As both a filmmaker and freelance journalist, O'Connor lets the reader experience his journey through both the media's eye-of which he is very critical-and his own personal experiences...
...Hammond begins by locating the origins of political and social consciousness-especially the transformative potential of education-in the theology of liberation which established a "preferential option for the poor" and "made people feel the need for literacy...
...Jack Hammond's Fighting to Learn provides an excellent analysis and an assessment of one such experiment...
...Major incursions by rail, road and air were made into the region during the 21year reign of the country's military as they encouraged resource extraction in the Amazon...
...He relies on the experiences of teachers and learners, of those who share the "little bit that they know," in order to assess the effectiveness of the project...
...The rise of Christian base communities throughout the countryside created the possibility for universal access to education...
...In a grossly unequal society like El Salvador, the oppressed must fight in order to create opportunities for learning, but they must first learn that they have the right to demand an education...
Vol. 32 • November 1998 • No. 3
