Abstract
During its eleven-year guerrilla war, the Farabundo Mart!
National Liberation Front (FMLN) of El Salvador attempted to educate
its troops, most of whom, recruited from the peasantry, were
illiterate or barely literate. There were three main areas of
education: basic literacy, technical training--both of which gave
combatants skills necessary to the war effort--and political
orientation, regarded as reinforcing their motivation to fight. The
FMLN worked with the techniques and assumptions of popular education,
according to which many teachers are only slightly more educated than
their pupils, political content and pedagogy are combined, and
everyone is urged to learn and assumed to be capable of learning,
regardless of background. Educating peasant combatants was an
expression of the FMLN's egalitarian ideology but at the same time
highlighted differences due to social origin and between men and
women. The educational process contributed importantly to the FMLN's
relative military success and had a major impact on the combatants.
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