Community Education: To Reclaim and Transform What Has Been Made Invisible

Abstract

In this article Munir Fasheh discusses the role of education as an agent of hegemony and presents an alternative model of community education that is empowering and suited to the needs of the learners. Munir Fasheh, a Palestinian mathematics teacher, presents a powerful analysis of his formal education and how it limited his ability to see and understand the complexity and richness of his illiterate mother's math. Further, he argues that the development of community education is critical to the empowerment of the Palestinian people and is a necessary development of the intifadeh, which reflects a collective human response to an oppressive situation. Fasheh values the basic message of the human element in any educational,transformational process and emphasizes the "treasure that exists in every individual."He analyzes the impact formal education has had on the Palestinian community and offers a model of community education that "reclaims people's lives, their sense of selfworth,and their ways of thinking from hegemonic structures, and facilitates their ability to articulate what they do and think about in order to provide a foundation for autonomous action."