Freedom as a goal and instrument of popular education

Abstract

The article offers some reflections on freedom in the human condition, understood as the aim of popular education. Freedom, within the individual experience, arises as a problem associated with the construction of personal identities and the 'designing Self'; one way to approach the theme of freedom from an educational perspective is certainly to recognize its stringent relationship with the practices of guidance. The conditions by which freedom can be made possible for the individual are part of the responsibilities that education assumes towards young people, the common good and the future; it is precisely in the plots of the discourse on freedom and on the redefinition of social practices that it is possible to trace the main value of a popular education.