POPULAR EDUCATION IN HEALTH: liberatory education mediating the promotion of health and empowerment

Abstract

Health education has been establishing itself within a concept of health promotion and within this, dialoguing with the concept of empowerment, However, these concepts can be linked to the behaviorist notion of habits and lifestyle changes - seen as the comprehension of risk factors – or to the notion of quality of life in its community aspect. Paulo Freire is considered one of the theorists who have inspired the notion of community empowerment. This article offers some reflections on these notions, based on the presupposition that the Pedagogia do Oprimido [Pedagogy of the Oppressed] needs to be revisited in order to understand the dimension of liberatory education and with it, “awareness” as mediation for autonomy and authorship of the world, and not as the vertical action of professionals used to “raising awareness” of the population of the need for empowerment, which is characteristic of a banking education.