Narrations and Knowledges at the Beginnings of Modern Schooling in Mexico

Abstract

This article rescues a series of texts produced by schoolteachers between 1820 and 1890 in order to comply with the ruling educational authority’s request for the elaboration of reports on their institutions. These documents are located in the General Public Instruction collection of the Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal. The schoolteachers’ narrations are analysed from the perspective of their conceptual frameworks and structures of rationality. Through the narrations of the schoolteachers, written in their reports to the authorities, we can trace the emergence from practical experience of a collection of knowledges that reveal the conceptual frameworks and the structures of rationality that enable us to understand early schooling in Mexico. The article argues that the practical knowledge concerning the state of schooling contained in these texts constitutes the beginnings of a mode of conceptualizing educational processes that differs in nature to that which was developed by the pedagogical sciences, and that is directly linked to strategies of governance.

Notes

¹ Translation: David M. J. Wood; photography: Flavia Bonasso.

² The field of pedagogy in Mexico is generally thought to have been formed in the latter third of the nineteenth century through the dissemination of the ideas of Spanish and French pedagogues in specialized journals such as La voz de la instrucción, 1870 and La enseñanza, 1875, and with the publication of the first pedagogical treatises by Mexican authors: Manuel Flores (Elementos de educación, 1884) and Luis E. Ruiz (Tratado elemental de pedagogía, 1900), both of whom were doctors by profession. In 1882 the Congress of Hygiene and Pedagogy was held in Mexico City, the first meeting of specialists working on educational matters. The country’s first teacher training colleges were also established in these years: in Jalapa in 1886, and in the capital in 1887.

³ This article derives from a wider piece of research on the genesis and development of educational knowledge in Mexico, published in Granja Castro, Josefina. Formaciones conceptuales en educación. México: Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados–Universidad Iberoamericana, 1988.

⁴ For the notion of governance, see: Foucault, Michel. “La gubernamentalidad.” In Espacios de poder, edited by Julia Varela. Madrid: La Piqueta, 1981: 9–27 and id. Vigilar y Castigar. México: Siglo XXI, 1976.

⁶ Krauze, Enrique. Siglo de caudillos. México: Tusquets, 1994: 119.

⁵ Meneses, Morales E. Tendencias educativas oficiales en México 1821–1911. México: Porrúa, 1983.

⁷ Lists of attendance, reports on pupils’ progress, inventories of books used for teaching, inventories of school furniture and equipment, records of schools’ incomes and expenditures, teachers’ requests for leaves of absence and requests for supply teachers, etc.

⁸ The aim of this rule was to regulate competition between teachers. The teachers’ guild was abolished in 1823, in recognition of the principle that any citizen had the right to found an establishment of instruction.

⁹ AHDF. IPG, vol. 2475, file 6.

¹⁰ The name given to teaching establishments run by women without qualifications, but with a permit to teach. They oversaw elementary education for girls, including needlework.

¹¹ AHDF. IPG, vol. 2476, file 50.

¹² AHDF. IPG, vol. 2477, files 250 and 251. Reliable statistical estimates show that in 1820 Mexico City had a total of 80 primary education institutions, serving approximately 5000 children. By 1838 the number had risen to 147 institutions, serving almost 7000 pupils. Tanck Estada, D. La educación ilustrada 1786–1836. México: El Colegio de México, 1998: 197.

¹³ AHDF. IPG, vol. 2478, file 299.

¹⁴ Goody, Jack. “Capacidad de escribir y clasificación: al resolver las tablas” and “¿Qué hay en una lista?” In id. La domesticación del pensamiento salvaje. Madrid: Akal, 1985. Goody’s description of the use of the “chart” and the “list” in order to select, order and present information proves highly useful in analysing schoolteachers’ changing report‐writing practices during the nineteenth century, and their epistemological and sociocultural implications. For the chart as an epistemic device affecting social relations and taxonomies, see also the chapter “Los cuerpos dóciles” in Foucault’s Vigilar y castigar.

¹⁵ These bulletins were first published in 1839 by the National Institute for Geography and Statistics, established in 1833 and later known as the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics (SMGE). Mexico was the first country in Latin America to found a scientific society of this type, and the Bulletin was the first publication of its kind in the region, with Brazil (1838) and Argentina (1879) being the next countries to follow. In the nineteenth century Geography and Statistics had earned a significant standing within the domain of scientific knowledge, their status as applied sciences giving them an added advantage. In Mexico the studies of the SMGE gained strategic importance in the process of discovering the economic, demographic and geopolitical physiognomy of the nascent country, and contributed to the construction of the “scientifically” substantiated concept of a nation. Granja Castro, Josefina. “Los saberes sobre la educación en los discursos científicos de México en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.” Revista Mexicana de Investigación Educativa VII, no.14 (2002): 155–79.

¹⁶ That this field of knowledge had reached such a high level of development comes as no surprise when we take into account that populations had been an object of study since the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. According to Louis Henry, it was France that first drew up registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, making them mandatory by the start of the seventeenth century and around 1792 this task was handed over from parishes to town halls. Henry, Louis. “La demografía histórica.” In Tendencias actuales de la historia social y demográfica, by C. Cardoso. México: Sep‐Setentas, 1976: 29–42. In Mexico the process of converting the creation of registers into an official and compulsory practice had its own peculiar development. The activity was secularized in 1857, during the liberal government of Juárez and under the laws of the reform movement, and civil registry was made obligatory. However, it was a long time before the general population became accustomed to the practice. A state report of 1889 alluded to this reluctance, attributing it to the ignorance of a population that saw no benefit in informing the government of its civil status, but rather a risk of being inspected by the public treasury so as to be obliged to pay more taxes.

¹⁷ In 1894, Luis E. Ruiz presented his “Project for the Definitive Organisation of Municipal Education,” which he claimed was based on the first school census to have been carried out in Mexico City. AHDF. IPG, vol. 2511, file 3048.

¹⁸ These contrasts can be observed in government reports giving descriptions, within a single document, of the conditions of the various fields of public administration: hospitals, prisons, army, etc.

¹⁹ According to Guereña and Viñao, countries such as Spain had been carrying out censuses for educational ends since late 1790, see: Guereña, Jean‐Louis, and Viñao Frago Antonio. “Estadística escolar, proceso de escolarización y sistema educativo nacional en España 1750–1850.” Boletín de la Sociedad de Demografía Histórica XVII, no. II (1999): 115–40. In Mexico, and in other Latin American countries, it was not until nearly a century later that such practices were undertaken, once a certain stability and level of infrastructure had been attained following the wars of independence, and against the backdrop of the new forms of government that came with the emerging nation‐states. See: Weinberg, Gregorio. Modelos educativos en la historia de América Latina. Buenos Aires: Comisión Económica para América Latina–United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1995.

²⁰ AHDF. IPG, vol. 2480, file 476. In 1851 Mexico City had 122 primary schools that served 7633 pupils. By 1867 the number had risen to 414 schools, while the number of pupils decreased slightly to 7492. Meneses Morales, Tendencias educativas oficiales, 849.

²¹ AHDF. IPG, vol. 2428, file 646.

²² The source study for this report was entitled “Población” (“Population”). It provided such information as was available at that time on Mexico’s population, covering the following categories: censuses carried out to date, population by sexes, moral statistics or criminality, and state of “popular instruction.” Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística I, 1841.

²³ Spain produced its first complete official statistics on teaching in 1850. See: Guereña and Viñao, “Estadística escolar.”

²⁴ Díaz Covarrubias, José. La instrucción pública en México. México: Imprenta de Gobierno, 1875. According to this study Mexico City had a total of 354 primary schools of all kinds, serving 22,200 pupils. It reported 8103 schools nationwide with 349,001 children in attendance. Ibid., LX, LXXX.

²⁵ AHDF. IPG, vol. 2493, file 1703. In 1878, 380 schools were operating in Mexico City, serving 13,978 pupils. By the end of the century that figure had risen to 526 institutions with a total of 51,755 pupils. González Navarro, M. Estadísticas sociales del porfiriato. México: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1956: 45.

²⁶ Santoni Rugiu, Antonio. Nostalgia del maestro artesano. México: Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994.

²⁷ Goody refers to this as the “reflexive potentialities of writing”. Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

²⁸ Roldán Vera, Eugenia. The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence: Education and Knowledge Transmission in Transcontinental Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

²⁹ Díaz Covarrubias’s statistical compendium takes as its reference point the statistical school surveys carried out by various different countries which he was able to access as Minister for Public Education from 1872 to 1876 and as a member of Mexico’s intellectual elite. His report cites data from countries in Europe (Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Scotland, Belgium, Austria and Hungary; Spain was “curiously” not included) and Latin America (Chile, Brazil and Colombia), as well as the USA. His analytical categories are based on indicators that allow an overall description of the state of national schooling, such as “number of schools per inhabitant”, “number of children of the age and aptitude to attend school”, “average school population”, etc., comparing the numerical data between countries in order to establish criteria to guide state policy on education.

³⁰ The first programme to regulate public instruction in post‐independence Mexico, formulated in 1823, established the subjects or “branches” that should be studied (reading, writing, basic maths, arithmetic, Spanish grammar, spelling, religious and moral catechism, geometry, political catechism and drawing), but did not state the entire duration of the primary level. It was not until 1878 that a piece of legislation stated the duration of primary school: three years for boys and two years for girls. In 1887 this rose to six years for both boys and girls, and in 1891 it fell back to four years.

³¹ AHDF. IPG, vol. 2478, file 352.

³² AHDF. IPG, vol. 2493, file 1703.

³³ AHDF. IPG, vol. 2503, file 2509.

³⁴ Debates del Congreso Nacional de Instrucción Pública. México: Imprenta del Partido Liberal, 1889.

³⁵ The notion of “school age”—a vital concept in defining the limits of compulsory education—developed along similar lines in Mexico and in other Latin America countries, both in chronological terms and in terms of the age ranges themselves. In Argentina, for example, compulsory education from 6 to 14 years was established in 1882. See: Cucuzza, Rubén. De Congreso a Congreso. Crónica del Primer Congreso Pedagógico Argentino. Buenos Aires: Besana, 1986.

³⁶ Reading and writing: syntactical method; Spelling: analytical method; Geography and Drawing: intuitive method; Morality: interrogative method; History: narrative method. AHDF. IPG, vol.2489, file 1426.

³⁷ Methods in public schools: objective and subjective. Methods in private schools: synthetic‐analytical, objective, interrogative, subjective, theoretical‐practical, Socratic, intuitive and mixed. AHDF. IPG, vol. 2494, file 1852.

³⁸ During the final third of the nineteenth century a new terminology began to circulate within pedagogical discourses and schooling circles, whereby the expressions lecciones de cosas and lecciones objetivas alluded to the “objective teaching system”. This method came to replace the mutual and simultaneous method that had predominated for almost all of the nineteenth century.

³⁹ The concepts of secular and free education, which also emerged and were defined during the nineteenth century, were equally crucial.

⁴⁰ According to the 1895 census Mexico’s illiteracy rate was 83%, and in 1899 only 30% of school‐age children attended school. Meneses Morales, Tendencias educativas oficiales, 854.

⁴¹ Müller identifies these features on the basis of his analysis of the structural alterations in secondary education in late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Germany. For Müller this type of educational system is configured along very precisely defined lines: “only when the various schools forms or educational institutions are interconnected, when the parts of the system are related to each other and their functions interdefined, should one have recourses to the concept of a system.” Müller, Detlef, Fritz Ringer, and Brian Simon. The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction 1870–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 16. In Mexico, this form of educational system began to appear in discussions on education policy and the reflections of pedagogues in the period following the Revolution. Its most direct forebear was the Veracruz State Pedagogical Congress in 1915 which met in order to moot and propose concrete solutions to the need to link upper primary education with the final stages of secondary education, “owing to the gulf existing between the two levels.” We can thus draw interesting conclusions with regard to the processes of resignifying and appropriating ideas of modernization in such contexts as Latin America, for although the notion of the “educational system” was known and had formed part of national pedagogical and political discourses since the late nineteenth century, the type of processes referred to were quite different.