The main purpose of this article is to situate popular education within the context of the reconstruction of the public sphere in Latin America. It is argued, after returning to the social and pedagogical locations where popular education originated, that a distinctive trait of popular education is the notion of search itself, in the same sense that the Latin American identity itself constitutes a similar space of possibilities. This is followed by an analysis of some clandestine pedagogical strategies, thus understood since they are characterized respectively as absence or for what is hidden by hegemonic pedagogical theory: pedagogy of survival, of resistance, and of relation. At the end there is an allusion to the image of the labyrinth for defining the perplexities - past and present - of popular education.
popular education; Latin America; public sphere; clandestine pedagogies