Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerilla War in El Salvador

This book is an inspired, readable, and labor of love account of the growth of popular education in El Salvador. The writer shares the continuing challenges faced and rewards shared by students, teachers, and those who teach the teachers. As in El Salvador, the US, especially Texas, California, Florida, New Mexico, Arizona will increasingly face similar challenges. With the growth of the Spanish speaking populations in the U.S. over the next twenty years, educators and health care professionals will be challenged to adapt and at times abandon certain professional roles and attitudes, in favor of more indigenous methods and messengers for advancing literacy and promoting life enhancing health practices and interventions. Public policy in Texas is already shifting toward the use of community based practitioners in healthcare with a view toward building social capital in Hispanic cultures that can become self-sustaining. Professional treatment and education models are not abandoned, but new program growth may be toward the use of professionals to teach the teachers, health educators, and care givers to care for their own communities, and build community based, rather than, state driven programs. Social service professionals in the U.S. may see their future in this book.