POPULAR EDUCATION AND LIFELONG LEARNING: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL-EXISTENTIAL READING OF PAULO FREIRE

Abstract

This article analyzes convergences between existential phenomenology and Freirean thought, taking this dialogue as an interpretative key to the concepts of popular education and lifelong learning. It is a theoretical-bibliographical study, with a qualitative approach, based on the works of Paulo Freire, in dialogue with authors of the phenomenological tradition, who understand the subject as a historical being constituted from lived experience. Categories such as lived world, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and corporeality contribute to understanding why, in Paulo Freire, educating does not mean depositing content, but producing meaning from experience, in relation to the other and to the world. It concludes that phenomenology can illuminate the understanding of the status of the lived experience and dialogue in Freire's work, provided that this reading does not neglect its ethical-political dimension, reducing education to a mere description of experience and emptying its horizon of social transformation.