Persistence and ruptures: the feminization of teaching and teacher education in Argentina

Abstract

This article argues that in order to understand the feminization of the teaching profession in Argentina, it is essential to examine two key dynamics: (1) the historical and institutional life of teacher education programs and the social representations about what teachers ought to be advanced by those programs; and (2) the symbolic, economic and social relationships established between a feminized teaching workforce and the development and maintenance of a national project of public schooling. Accordingly this article will analyze the three most significant institutional structures developed to educate public school teachers in Argentina and the paradigmatic images of teaching emphasized by each model of teacher education: ‘normal school’, the ‘technical development school’ and the ‘flexible professional school’. Each of the three models had a favored social representation of teachers (‘apostles/second mothers’, ‘technicians’ and ‘adjusted professional’) which expressed in complex ways institutional responses to the social, political, and economical conflicts that structured and strained the project of public schooling in Argentina.

Notes

1. It is important to note that Sarmiento is remembered and honored with a national holiday as the ‘schoolteacher of the nation’, ‘the father of the classroom’. Every year for the anniversary of his death, September 11th, all elementary schools celebrate El Día del Maestro (sic) or ‘Male teacher’s day’. Many female teachers commonly joke that the poor state of schools is not surprising because the system ‘has a dead father and no mother to take care of it’.

2. Adriana Puiggrós and many of her colleagues at the APPEAL institute (Puiggrós, 1991) have forcefully argued that the ‘official defeat’ of anti‐state Catholic forces such a downfall did not imply the absence of religion within the curriculum. (Alejandra Birgin, 1999) further comments that religion and morality were not incompatible terms because even secular educators within the normal movement saw religion as a powerful ‘civilizing’ tool.

3. In Argentina, lower salaries for women were and still are generally accepted and, as will be discussed later, in some cases even justified by the sexist belief that women’s salaries should ‘complement’ their husbands’ incomes (Jelin, 1998).

4. Before the 1930s, in the province of Buenos Aires not a single woman was appointed for the position of district supervisor. See (Pineau, 1997) and (Bonder, 1992)

5. This vision is what Paulo Freire called the nutritionist view of knowledge, in which ‘Illiterates are considered “undernourished”, not in the literal sense in which many of them really are, but because they lack the “bread of the spirit”’ (Freire, 1985, p. 45). Illiteracy, in a consistent way was conceived of as a ‘poison herb’.

6. As noted before the disproportionate presence of males in the higher echelons of the school bureaucracy relates to the preferential treatment granted to males by norms such as the 3X1 but it also reflects the traditional assumption that ‘men’ are better suited to occupy those administrative and authoritative positions. The abolition of the 3X1 rule, had the immediate effect to increase the participation of women in leadership positions reaching 57% in 1978 and growing to 80% by 1998.

7. The list of those legal instruments is: the Transference Law N°24.049/91 and Presidential Decree N°954/92; the Federal Law of Education, N°24.195/93; Resolution 32/93 of the Federal Council of Culture and Education (CFCyE), ‘Alternatives for the formation, perfecting and training of teachers’, Decree 36/94 of the CFCyE, Federal Network of Continuous Teacher Education, Law of Higher Education N°24.521/95.

8. The fact that gender equity can be achieved in one area and not in others is evident in the results of a study of women’s empowerment in 58 countries published in 2005 by the World Economic Forum. In this report Argentina presents the very curious situation of having two of the worst indicators of gender empowerment (position 55 in salary equity and 54 in reproductive health) and one of the best, Number 3 (after Sweden and Uruguay), in terms of educational gender equity (Lopez‐Claros & Zahidi, 2005).

9. Eva Perón or as was popularly known Evita, defied almost all the moral principles of Argentina’s hegemonic cultural conservatism of the 1950s including those of the official Catholic Church. At the same time, however, she exploited the imaginery of the dutiful wife who stood behind her husband and proposed traditional roles for women (Taylor, 1979). Even today, the historical figure of Evita arises great controversy. Taylor (1979) develops the idea that Evita was extremely skillful at using socially and culturally accepted female attributes in manners and styles that interposed, challenged and gave comfort to both men and women.

10. The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo forced the whole country to reconsider what was public and private. As one of the Mothers eloquently expressed: ‘When everyone was terrorized we didn’t stay at home crying—we went to the streets to confront them directly. We were mad but it was the only way to stay sane’ (quoted in Molyneux, 1992, p. 188).