Reflections on Community Education: An Alternative Look at Formal Education

Abstract

Community education is a decolonial and liberating construct, an alternative and sociocritic opposition to the formal educational model imposed by governments as the only standard way a student must follow to educate himself, thus denying the other ways of learning, perceiving and ideating the world. The study proposes to rethink the current educational reality in relation to the category of community education from the epistemologies of the South. The methodology was framed in the qualitative hermeneutic approach, being the core of the research the bibliographic review of a set of articles, books and other secondary sources, which were located in search engines such as Google Scholar and other indexed sites.   For the bibliographic review, the search for information was given through the preconceived descriptors and the general theory used in the study. The results show that community education is an emerging category and broadly framed in the thinking of Paulo Freire, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Edgardo Lander. It is under this theoretical framework that community education is conceived as an educational alternative that promotes the acceptance of cultural diversity and the strengthening of the cultural identity of children, adolescents and young people, this is because local knowledge in them has been losing relevance and importance, due to the effect and influence of modernity and globalization.