Popular Education In Timor-Leste: past and present experiences

PREFACE Antero Benedito, Samuel Penteado Urban and Irlan von Linsingen asked me to write an introduction to this work published in English, which reports the past and present of the ‘Popular Education’ in Timor-Leste.

Education is part of human nature. Man learns, preserves, and transmits knowledge, experiences, culture, and arts. The word ‘educação’, ‘education’, ‘edukasaun´ derives from three Latin words: “educare” and “educere” which mean “educare” meaning to create, to feed in the primitive sense; also derives from “educere” which means outward direction and the verb “ducere”, to conduct, to take from the inside out, to drive out, to extract. Before the verbs ‘educare’, ‘educere’ and ‘ducere’ become contradictory, they complement each other to tell us that education consists of two movements: one, from the inside out, development; another, from the outside in, help, food, support, the guidance of others.

The term education leads us to first think of children and adolescents. Education is associated with pedagogy, which comes from the Greek pais, paidós, guy/child; and agogô or agogé, which means to conduct, action to conduct. Therefore, Pedagogy literally means “driving children”.

When the authors of this book refer to “Popular Education”, I think that this education has a broader horizon. It is not only for children and young people but also for adults, the people, the most disadvantaged class.

However, before we get to the heart of the matter, ‘popular education’, it is convenient to refer to the social environment of the territory of Timor-Leste.

Timorese society was primarily traditional and agricultural. The Timorese lived in villages, in the mountains, and on the plateaus and plains. In some periods of history, men lived in war. One cannot speak about the education level in the European or Western way. Children learned the uses and customs of their ancestors in a logic of traditional home education, namely transmitted from parents to children: for boys, to keep sheep and/or buffalo flocks; cultivate the land to sow, 6