The beneficial tyranny of politics: emergence, institutionalisation and newer issues of the history of education in Latin America

ABSTRACT

This article sketches the emergence, institutionalisation and emergent issues and challenges in the scholarly field of history of education in Latin America. It argues that these processes have been closely linked with nation-building and the decisive role of national politics. The impact of national politics is herein called a ‘beneficial tyranny’. This was certainly true for the first major works written in the late nineteenth century and the major waves of historiography until the slow institutionalisation of the major site of research in history of education: the study of education at universities in the 1960s as well as the institutionalisation of the field of history of education with the establishment of academic societies and specific journals in the 1990s. Yet this interpretation does not explain more recent developments in the field. By looking at recent publications in all major journals of the region for the years 2020 and 2021, new historiographical trends clearly emerge.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• nation-building
• networking
• educational research
• politics

In 2010, many Latin American countries celebrated the 200th anniversary of their respective independence movements. The selection of this year as the central reference for such a commemoration did not do justice to the divergent paths towards independence trodden by the different former Spanish and Portuguese colonies. But, in 1810, many of the prospective republics were in turmoil and decisive movements towards autonomy and independence had been initiated. Ibero-American historians of education commemorated this significant anniversary with a conference of hitherto unseen proportions: more than 1500 scholars, researchers and students flocked to Rio de Janeiro in that year. To our knowledge, no academic meeting of researchers in the field of history of education has attracted such extensive participation before: not the annual conferences of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE), not the annual meetings of the national societies of the Anglophone world, not even the meetings of an enormous country with a vast higher education sector, such as India. Latin American historians of education were themselves a little taken aback by this meeting. The enormous proportions of the conference had many explanations. One major reason was that the city where the meeting was held allowed the then exploding community of Brazilian scholars to participate in the event. Yet it was not only the continental proportions of the country that were responsible for the size of this gathering. The community of scholars researching and working in the field of history of education had developed significantly in the region since the final decades of the twentieth century, albeit to different degrees. The substantial groups of Argentineans, Mexicans and Colombians, for instance, contrasted with the very few participants from Peru, certainly not a tiny country in the region geographically speaking.

This article sketches the emergence, institutionalisation, and salient issues and challenges of this field of study. Of course, this study will be many things but not exhaustive. The sheer dimensions of the countries, their rapidly growing higher education sectors, and the accelerated institutionalisation of research in the recent decades render it impossible to deliver such a study in the limited space of a journal article. Nonetheless, we shall follow one leading hypothesis that links the emergence, consolidation and recent expansion of this field with the decisive role that politics has played as a major factor in the field’s development. We call the impact of politics a ‘beneficial tyranny’. In our argument, politics was highly beneficial for the development of history of education as a field of study because of the place that history and education have in these countries’ imaginations and cultures. Of course, the very term ‘politics’ is a historical one. Whereas, in the early times of the new Latin American polities, politics was strongly related to state and national struggles of power, the emergence of popular and subaltern movements and the growth of a politically assertive civil society changed the meanings of ‘politics’ over the course of time. While this understanding of ‘politics’ – as perhaps the most critical frame for understanding the development of a Latin American historiography of education – may seem too broad and even vague, we do not refer to ‘politics’ in the very general sense that everything is somewhat political. Rather, we argue that the explicit political framing of Latin American educational historiography was a major force for the strengths and difficulties of this field of research.

In the following, we sketch a history of the first forms of writing about the educational past in the region and look at the first works written in the late nineteenth century and the major waves of historiography until the slow institutionalisation of the main site of research in history of education: the study of education at universities in the 1960s. In a second section, the institutionalisation of the field of history of education focuses on the establishment of academic societies and specific journals in the 1990s, providing for a preliminary cartography of this scholarship. In a third section, we look at the recent trends in scholarship in the field by looking at the publications in these journals and individual major works. Finally, we give an admittedly incomplete view of major recent trends, emergent problems and significant challenges for this growing community of scholars. This overview will provide some insights into major developments and patterns of knowledge production without fully doing justice to the highly differentiated scholarship of the field. In particular, results in the biggest countries of the region are in focus. The underlining idea of this contribution may sound preposterous, and, in fact, we willingly accept the considerable risk associated with this. Indeed, this attempt at a more general mapping and interpretation is only possible due to the noticeable number of national analyses of historiographical tendencies published in the last two decades. Nonetheless, we aim to provide some general points concerning the development of the different educational historiographies in the region rather than simply remaining in the more secure waters of national characterisations.

Emergence of the history of education and the liberal-conservative state (approx. 1850–1960)

In order to describe the emergence of scholarly knowledge in the history of education, we shall look briefly into the early waves of scholarship. As we shall show, Latin American historiography showed a marked preference for investigating the divide between colonial and independent times. This dominant periodisation already showed a close connection between the emerging historiographies, but not just educational ones, and the political task of nation-building. Periodisations are one significant element of historical narratives, framing processes, cutting more comprehensive developments into treatable parts and organising lines of change in time.¹ We take this preferred periodisation as a revealing choice for the authors who embarked on writing the history of education in the region.² Following political caesura as a main narrative frame, most authors showed the building of the new polities as a main concern for educational historiography.

Independence as a major milestone for the writing of history was, of course, a rather obvious choice. Education had rarely been an object of scholarship in the region until the new republics and the Brazilian Empire emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. One major exception occurred in the earliest time of conquest. The massive shifts in demography, economy and cultural life that the Iberian conquest of the territories in the ‘new’ continent brought upon the indigenous populations were dramatic and enduring. However, it was not only military force and brutality that brought about these transformations, but also knowledge. Knowledge, its accumulation and systematisation, proved helpful for reverting disadvantageous situations for the Spaniards, as the case of the conquest of Mexico impressively showed.³ It is in this early colonial context of conflicting encounters and epistemic negotiations that knowledge of a (still living) educational past emerged at the intersection between conquest and Christian mission. A Franciscan missionary, Bernardino de Sahagún, organised a series of inquiries into the Central Valley culture in today’s Mexico in the 1560s and 1570s. Among the information collected by this ‘early researcher in the field of education’,⁴ the question of upbringing and schooling, accompanied by references to past practices, attracted some attention. For these enquiries, Sahagún reunited the elders and the political authorities and posed questions about society, culture, religion and education. In this sense, a retrospective knowledge of education in the region emerged as what later would be called oral history. This quite ethnographic approach yielded to more authoritative and repressive approaches, impeding the formation of a significant body of written knowledge concerning the institutions of education of the native groups.

During the consolidation of colonial order, no prominent scholarly interest in the educational past is on record. The question of the offer of school only became a problem after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the continent in the 1760s. Yet this tectonic shift in the history of schooling in the region did not lead to a consistent investigation into the educational past. Only cursory references to the lost greatness of the pre-Columbian empires circulated, together with scattered information about the educational past.⁵ After the escape of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and the emergence of autonomous, later independentist movements in the American colonies, a new political and educational time began. The formal independence of the former colonies, completed by about 1822, not only had a continental scale; it also displayed major political transformations that affected education, especially the creation of republican or representative forms of government and the emergence of modern politics. A persistent discourse regarding colonial inheritance as a major impediment to the development of the new polities developed over the decades. One of its major tenets was that the role that ‘colonial education’ played was a significant factor for continued ‘backwardness’, political strife and civil wars.⁶ Eventually, the first major work on the history of education published in the region indirectly confirmed the close association between the production of knowledge concerning the educational past and independence. At first sight, Antonio Bachiller y Morales’ major work in three volumes on the history of Cuban literature and public instruction, published in Havana in 1859, may contradict this link since Cuba was still a Spanish colony at that time and no traces of independentism can be found in the succinct introduction to the book.⁷ Yet Bachiller y Morales, a lawyer by training as well as a historian and journalist, was an ardent supporter of Cuban independence and liberalism and had to go into exile in the United States some years later. Still, apart from this major work, a knowledge of the educational past, present in political discussions, largely remained patchy and unsystematic for much of the nineteenth century.

Major works addressing the educational past that followed continued the older tradition of creole patriotism⁸ and advanced analyses mostly dealing with the transitions from late colonial times to independence. In 1868, Juan María Gutiérrez, the then president of the University of Buenos Aires, published a comprehensive and well-documented history of higher education in the Province of Buenos Aires from the later colonial times until approximately 1830.⁹ The work also included a bibliography of educational literature and a prosopography of university professors until 1867. Gutiérrez, a staunch liberal, clearly related the advancement of sciences and literature to the disintegration of the Spanish colonial world and the coming of liberal republics. This tendency to link educational and political history in a liberal vein was also evident in some of the earliest works on educational history. In 1889, the physician José Ricardo Pires de Almeida, an honorary member of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, published a comprehensive book focused on school statistics and legislation. The volume, L’instruction publique au Brésil: histoire et legislation (1500–1889), bore a deceptive title because the colonial times from 1500 until 1820 were only succinctly treated in the introduction. Conceived as a monument to the young nation and a product of ‘national pride as well as patriotic desire’,¹⁰ the work of more than one thousand pages in French ostensibly aimed to locate the country in an international discourse of educational progress, leading to extensive comparisons with rival Argentina, but also with all ‘civilised’ nations.¹¹ A few other works with similar characteristics existed. Some were commissioned by political authorities interested in documenting educational ‘progress’,¹² others reconstructed the high educational hopes from the time of independence,¹³ and others explicitly addressed the emergence of common schooling.¹⁴ An early exception to the rather unified liberal narrative of a new republican time that was somewhat independent of Catholic influence was published in Chile at the end of the nineteenth century. Frontaura Arana’s Noticias históricas tried to revise the negative view of ‘colonial education’ and proposed a reinterpretation of its last decades as a preparation for the ‘glorious’ days of independence.¹⁵ At this point, educational historiography became fully involved in the conflicting views regarding the origins of the modern republics. Many of them may have been related to the tradition of the public intellectual¹⁶ that characterised intellectual and historiographical endeavours in the region and played a major role in mobilising history in the context of political struggles. This kind of public engagement would pervade the nature of many historiographical projects in the region.

If educational historiography and political caesura were intimately related in the earliest works on the history of education in the region, the case of Argentina may serve to demonstrate that these links did not loosen in the course of time. In 1910, Juan P. Ramos published the first major, comprehensive, almost monumental work on the history of primary education in the country.¹⁷ One of the most significant educational administrators of the conservative era, José María Ramos Mejía, had commissioned the work. This official publication was part of the celebrations on the centenary of the first proclamations of political autonomy in 1810. Accordingly, the book framed the development of primary education in a strict political chronology, largely ignoring the strong continuities between late colonial educational policies and the first decades of independent republican life. Only the adoption of the primary education law no. 1420 in 1884 became an additional milestone for writing about the educational past. This law had introduced free, secular and compulsory schooling and was largely deemed a success, remaining until today a symbol of promising educational pasts in the country. For the fiftieth anniversary of the law the Argentinean educational authorities initiated a competition for books on the history of primary education in the country and defined three categories for the prizes: ‘primary instruction during the Spanish domination of the territory today known as the Argentinean Republic’, ‘primary instruction from 1810 to the sanction of the law 1420’, and ‘primary instruction under the law 1420’. We do not exactly know how many authors submitted monographs, but they were none too few. At least 27 authors submitted a work for the first category, 67 for the second and 47 for the third. Some of these works were published in the following years and became central references in the historiography of education.¹⁸ The constellation of state patronisation and political history was still prevalent: Law no. 1420 was far from being a specific law for schools. Instead, it epitomised the whole liberal project of a prosperous and modernised country. This was a chronology that referred at least to a major milestone of the educational past but, nonetheless, still offered a political key for reading this past. This historiographical path, heavily dominated by trained historians, also existed in Brazil, where major historiographic projects existed in the same vein.¹⁹

When authors working in the field of education, as opposed to trained historians, made their first attempts to write about the past of education, a slightly different approach emerged. A more general – not only national – approach was in use, particularly in the group of early manuals of history of education translated from French that circulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in many countries including Brazil.²⁰ While some Spanish translations circulated,²¹ other translations were also published in the region.²² They presented a historical narrative more strongly related to the development of ‘civilisation’, some of them with a rather liberal undertone, others more Catholic. Institutions of teacher education, which had expanded remarkably since the end of the nineteenth century, increasingly included history of education in the curriculum and this, of course, propelled the production of a type of knowledge that was at times related to their own research efforts, but was usually related to interpretations of the past with an educational, even moral purpose. As Adrián Ascolani convincingly showed in his analysis of the Argentinean case, these manuals departed from the mainstream of historiography and assumed a rather moralistic and philosophical tone.²³ Similarly, the textbooks for normal schools in Brazil also included not only national, but also general histories of western education. Some of them included international developments as being essential to the emergence of a New Education.²⁴ While the group of manuals and works of history of education produced and published in the field of normal schools and teacher training institutions may have been dominant if we consider the spread of the knowledge of the educational past, they were rarely related to consistent projects of research into the historical past.²⁵

All these authors remained part of the endeavour to legitimise the educational progress of the independent nations. Nonetheless, they advanced different interpretations. Some of them advanced a version of the educational past more in line with Catholic narratives that gained traction between the 1930s and 1950s. They maintained many of the political frames and chronology, but some of them also placed emphasis on a narrative frame that stressed the persistence of Catholicism in the region. They pointed to the Catholic faith of many of the founding fathers of the new countries, re-evaluated the Spanish and Portuguese heritage (both countries at that time being under national-catholic or conservative-authoritarian dictatorships) and tried to reinterpret the secularist turn in countries such as Mexico, Uruguay and Argentina as exceptions to be corrected. This group of Catholics attempted to rebrand Latin American countries as the outcome of clerical critique and mobilisation.²⁶ Although many of these authors were academics – not always trained historians – many of their works were also aimed at influencing teacher education with pocketbooks and introductions to the history of education.²⁷

Although this Catholic current should not be underestimated – some of these books reached larger audiences and were repeatedly published – this was not the whole story. A case in point is Amanda Labarca’s book on the history of education in Chile, a work coming from the more liberal-progressive and secular tradition within the field of education and related to the consolidation of the New Education among teachers and pedagogic authors. In her handbook, Labarca (1886–1975) still used the distinction between colonial and independent times, but within the latter she distinguished a kind of core time defined by the establishment (1842–1852) and ‘consolidation’ (1852–1879) of state competence in education and, following this, she defined ‘preparatory years’ (1810–1842) and times of ‘renovation’ (1880–1900).²⁸ This was, of course, still a narrative of political significance. Nonetheless, the more fine-grained periodisation of chapters shows that specific educational preoccupations came to the forefront. This narrative, although still closely related to the emergence of the individual national states, cultivated a sense of ‘Occidentalist’ internationality, particularly when addressing questions of educational reform and the New School Movement. A good example of this narrative of enormous influence was the handbooks authored by the Spanish exile educationist Lorenzo Luzuriaga (1889–1959). His books Historia de la educación pública (1946) and Historia de la educación y de la pedagogía (1951), of considerable importance in the region through their many editions, represented this breed of scholarship. In his own words, the books were not ‘an erudite research work, but rather an attempt to present the historical development of educational ideas and institutions in the most precise and clear way’.²⁹

Both historiographical traditions, the professional one related to the university and the rather ‘educational’ one produced for practitioners and future teachers, certainly emphasised educational ideas and their renewal as major factors of educational development. In this sense, this historiography was in line with analytical frames also cultivated in other regions. Nonetheless, even conservative works still dedicated considerable attention to the question of institutional development. The political mobilisation of history demanded that not only ideas but also concretisations should play a role in the analysis. A good example was the widely circulated work published by Luis Antonio Bohórquez Casallas on the history of education in Colombia. Bohórquez described different shapes of education: spontaneous education, word instruction and rote learning, objective teaching, and active teaching. This organisation of the chapters showed a marked educational concern related to past notions and representations of education. Yet all these different shapes of education still strictly coincided with political periodisations and also described policy and instructional culture. For instance, the end of objective teaching and the beginning of ‘active teaching’ is located in 1886, the year when a long-standing hegemony of the Conservative Party began.³⁰ While Bohórquez linked educational and political shifts so closely, he followed the inherited pattern of organising a narrative of the past that closely followed political caesuras.

Regardless of all the innovations associated with social history at the universities – innovations that often advanced other periodisations – when it came to the question of education, political periodisation remained crucial. This was the case for one of the major founding figures of Colombian social history, Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, who had introduced some innovations in the quite traditional field of the Historia de la Pedagogía,³¹ an old-school historiography of ideas. Jaramillo Uribe wrote significant contributions to the history of education in his country also following political periodisations.³² Other major works in other countries still structured much of their narration by following the succession of political periods. For instance, one major work inspired by philosophy, the Historia comparada de la educación en México (1944) by Francisco Larroyo, albeit complex and differentiated according to specific topics,³³ kept political periodisation as a definitive model for the organisation of the book in its main parts. Works fully placed in the nascent trend of social history, like Juan Carlos Tedesco’s Educación y Sociedad en Argentina (1970), similarly followed the pace of national politics in dealing with the historical past.³⁴ Whereas for other fields, such as the history of labour and economic history, social historians worked out alternative periodisations, the political framing of education still prevailed in many of their works. Again, exceptions apply to the rule. When looking at historiographies more focused on the links between popular and indigenous movements, for instance, other temporalities emerge, bringing a more dynamic view of educational development and conflict.³⁵ Nonetheless, these analyses, particularly when related to schooling, could not abstain from looking to major political occurrences.³⁶ This is a major difference from some works addressing questions such as education in the family or the history of childhood.³⁷ A deeper and more detailed consideration of newer historiographical developments and how they advanced their own periodisations beyond the simple framing of politics³⁸ cannot be carried out here and remains open to further analysis.

To be sure, books charting the history of one particular institution followed different patterns of classification and some exceptions to the ‘rule’ of politics and policy exist.³⁹ Yet many of the works briefly referred to here are foundational ones, coining styles of scholarship and dominant narratives with which later, increasingly academic, approaches had to contend. In a very political sense, the emergence of history of education as a field of scholarship intentionally accompanied the consolidation of modern polities and a rather secular breed of schooling. It looked to overcome what had come to be seen as ‘backwardness’ and, inevitably, was differentiated into analyses that could respectively celebrate the import of a (mostly) European modernity in a liberal vein, re-evaluate the Iberian Catholic roots of these countries in a positive direction, or emphasise the broken promises made during the development of educational systems. The focus on official schooling is, against this background, everything but unexpected: the spectacle of modern educational systems, no matter how limited in outreach and how deficient in advancing a more equal and democratic society, stood as one of the salient examples of the success of the independent republics that were looking to become ‘nations’.

The field of history of education in Latin America: institutionalisation and main features

Whereas previously professional historians or scholars related to teacher training institutions had been the main set of authors in the field of history of education, a relevant second wave of production was associated with the establishment of educational studies as a university discipline and research field in the 1960s. In this sense, history of education evolved from being knowledge focused on initial teacher training in special institutions to a more research-related field. The particular and intense connection of Latin American universities with the political developments of the last decades of the twentieth century also suggested a specific connection of the field of history of education with the field of politics and educational policy. Only after the consolidation of the field of history of education in universities, from around 1990 onwards, did scholars establish specific academic institutions and research journals. The different societies for the history of education in the region vary according to the degree of institutionalisation of the history of education in universities. Similarly, they also display different constellations of researchers coming from the fields of history and education research, which, in turn, has an impact on the selection of relevant research subjects and historiographical approaches. In general, history of education in Latin America presents a high degree of institutionalisation. In the context of two (quasi-)common languages and the revolution of digital communication, its networks are consistent and transnationally connected to a remarkable level.

One major context conducive to the expansion and institutionalisation of history of education as a scholarly endeavour was the end of the long series of military dictatorships in many countries during the 1980s, up to the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile in 1990. The imperative of political, cultural and social democratisation together with the chronic financial, organisational and educational problems characteristic of the school systems in the region promoted sustained interest in the histories of familial and school education. Since the process of political re-democratisation also included a significant expansion of higher education, more scholars began to work in the history of education in a consistent way. This background encouraged the establishment of scholarly societies in the main countries of the region. One case in point was the establishment of the Chilean Society for the History of Education in 1992. In a post-dictatorial context, a group of scholars from Catholic universities with apparent ideological affinities established the scholarly society. In this case, the founding members even shared quite a consistent research programme focusing on the history of ideas and the history of educational policies. After many preliminary meetings, scholars from a wide range of universities established the Argentine Society for the History of Education (SAHE) in 1995. In the cases of Argentina, Brazil (est. 1999) and Mexico (est. 2002) the emergence of influential societies was propelled by the existence of specific university chairs and by the importance of the history of education within the curricula for teachers’ education. However, it was not always a strong field of research in the history of education that led to the formation of a specific scholarly society. Competing networks of research exist in Colombia and some of them – particularly the group History of Pedagogical Practices – demonstrate a considerable record of research and publications over decades. Yet these networks never managed to create a common scholarly platform. Over time additional societies were established in Venezuela (2004), Uruguay (2010) and, more recently, in Peru (2020) and Paraguay (2021).

The historical and linguistic commonalities of the Latin American countries rapidly led to the formation of a transnational organisation even before major national societies were established. A widespread and consistent feeling of shared pasts and challenging presents continued to be prevalent in the region well after the end of colonial rule under the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. Some early scholarly projects addressing the whole region also contributed to this thinking.⁴⁰ The first Iberic-American Congress of the History of Education occurred not accidentally in 1992, when the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival on the American continent re-enacted controversies about conquest, colonialism and identity.⁴¹ In that meeting in Bogotá, there was an attempt to establish a common Society for the History of Education in Latin America (SHELA). Although the SHELA still exists,⁴² major controversies in the 1990s between different networks of researchers led to the organisation of a second initiative that grouped the existing national societies. This second network has since organised the CIHELA meetings (Congreso iberoamericano de historia de la educación), also including the Spanish and Portuguese national societies for history of education. In this sense, Iberic-American scholars have managed to establish genuinely scholarly meetings where the English language plays no major role in scientific communication. Until 2021, CIHELA had taken place 14 times in all of the major countries of the region. Up to 1600 scholars participated in some of the meetings, largely exceeding the attendance of the European network for History of Education within the European Education Research Association (EERA) or the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE). The formation of permanent working groups within the CIHELA has also contributed to establishing transnational scholarly communities, enhancing the possibilities for collaborative research and exchange. In sum, since the 1990s specific academic meetings in the field of history of education have multiplied quickly and added new opportunities for exchange, discussion and networking that had previously been represented only by the ISCHE conference.

The publication of scholarly journals dedicated entirely to the field of history of education constituted an additional aspect of the institutionalisation of research. Specific journals emerged from 1996 onwards, when the Argentine society began to publish its Anuario de la Sociedad Argentina de Historia de la Educación. História da Educação (1997), edited by a regional organisation of educational historians in South Brazil, and two journals edited in Colombia – Revista de Historia de la Educación Colombiana and Revista Historia de la Educación Latinoamericana, both edited by a network of researchers as an inter-institutional initiative since 1998 – followed quickly. The Brazilian national society for history of education added the Revista Brasileira de História da Educação (2001), a leading regional journal. Since 2013, journals have also emerged in Chile, Cuadernos Chilenos de Historia de la Educación, and Mexico, Revista Mexicana de Historia de la Educación. The continental dimensions of the Brazilian academic community led to a further differentiation of journals with the Revista de História e Historiografia de la Educação (2017), edited by a group of researchers within the Asociação Nacional de História, and at least one further regional journal, History of Education in Latin America (2018). Similarly, the Mexican society added a second journal in 2018 with the Anuario Mexicano de Historia de la Educación. With the aggregated effect of scholarly societies connected on the regional level and this considerable number of specific journals, the field of history of education became highly visible in the fields of both education and history. Moreover, all of them are open-access publications, something significant for the social impact of this kind of research, as it allows teachers and teachers-in-training to easily access newer insights and controversies.

This quick pace of institutionalisation, as already suggested, is built on a politico-educational background. It was not only the end of the dictatorship, in the case of Chile, but also controversies and resistance against various policies that set the stage for analysing the educational pasts. In the case of Argentina, the establishment of the SAHE evidently grouped together scholars who also heavily opposed the neoliberal and neoconservative policies imposed in the 1990s. Links between many of the scholars participating in the SAHE and teachers’ unions representatives, who also fought these policies, are well documented.⁴³ But even in cases where the institutionalisation of the field did not work, for instance in Colombia, the growth of scholarship was often associated with protest and struggle. The research group History of the Pedagogical Practices emerged in a context of widespread protests by teachers’ unions against technocratic reforms and disempowerment that had been enacted since the late 1960s. In this setting, teachers’ unions and their organic intellectuals, a category coined by one highly influential author in the field, Antonio Gramsci, vindicated the value of pedagogy as a type of knowledge and a pedagogical, rather than reductionistic, approach and investigated the educational past in order to explain the marginalisation of this type of knowledge from the realm of public policies.⁴⁴ It is in this sense, again, that politics and political processes and even cultural-political emotional communities were anything but detrimental to the advancement of history of education as a disciplinary endeavour.

Recent trends in scholarship: the newest journal publications and the political environment

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new political cycle commenced in many major Latin American countries. Decidedly progressive and leftist forces came to power and, in the following years, managed to win national and local elections. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, conservative and liberal parties instead prevailed in the same countries, something progressive observers characterised as a backlash against slight redistributive policies and more inclusive legislation towards indigenous and ‘coloured’ populations as well as women and, in some cases, sexual minorities. Overall, Latin America is experiencing a wave of political polarisation mirroring consequential trends in the politics around the world. Again, these crucial developments have touched different Latin American countries in different periods and with varying consequences. Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether the field of history of education, crucially marked by what we have called the beneficial tyranny of politics, shows the rifts and polarisations characteristic of today’s political life.

Latin American authors have explicitly linked the new progressive and leftist wave to shifts in academic work. ‘The leading role achieved by progressive political projects in numerous Latin American countries and the international treaties signed between them’ was linked with the possibility of opening ‘new debates on the contents and perspectives present in the training of future teachers’.⁴⁵ Besides, the political environment would foster a new look at authors neglected within ‘the dominant liberal historiography’, and a more inclusive approach beyond classic liberal narratives would enable discussions on ‘the articulations between history, education, and politics for the recovery of the educational alternatives that took place beyond the school systems’.⁴⁶ The political environment, in this view, consolidated innovative trends in historical research in education such as, for example, the history of school materiality, emotions and sensibilities, transnational exchanges, gendered perspectives and comparative approaches, among others.

As it is impossible to extensively survey the production of the whole field of the history of education in the region, we advance an exploratory analysis of the most recent scholarship in the field as shown in the main national and regional journals in Spanish and Portuguese for 2020 and 2021. We are aware that this selection may appear to be insufficient or highly biased and that we may not be giving a ‘representative’ view of this vibrant field of scholarship; yet the sheer volume of scholarly production and publication and its associated variety is unmanageable. For this reason, the selection of the newest journals presents a narrower but still reasonable focus. We ask what the impact of progressive trends, and eventually their backlashes, has had in the selection of topics and on historiographical perspectives for this selected corpus. If the emergence of the field of history of education is closely related to political transformations and political processes, do we see an impact in the recent political polarisation of the articles most recently published in major journals? Do we find in recent scholarship a purportedly incessant effectivity of the beneficial tyranny of politics? Or has the process of professionalisation of research and scholarship gone so far that the immediate impacts of political contexts are barely identifiable? To explore these questions, we largely exclude from our sample major books and edited volumes that are significant forms of scholarly communication. We have two reasons for this selection. First, following insights from the sociology of educational and social research, we consider journals as privileged sites for communicating scholarly knowledge; they are central displays of these developments, although they are certainly not the only point of reference for these scholarly communities.⁴⁷ Second, journals are the preferred form of publication in the systems of evaluation of academic output that have spread in virtually all Latin American countries in the last decades. With this approach, we include journals from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. The sample encompasses well-established and prestigious journals as well as newer ones considered to be more accessible and, probably, more local/regional in focus. A last note on the limits of the sample: as Latin American scholars are pressed to publish in international journals, particularly those in English, a growing share of the authors in international journals in the field may also come from Latin America. Our sample does not take this last breed of scholarship into account.

The available issues (as of November 2021) of the journals mentioned for 2020 and 2021 comprise 311 articles in both the general section of the journals and in the special thematic issues. Book reviews, interviews and other texts such as general introductions are not counted. All these journals are completely available online, something that certainly reinforces their impact and the circulation of the articles published. All articles are either in Spanish (131), or in Portuguese (180). We base our exploration on titles and abstracts, not on the detailed analysis of the complete texts. One characteristic of our sample is the blurring of hitherto quite stable differences between nationality of the author, subject and language of publication. During the whole twentieth century there was almost a rule that scholars do research on their own country in their own language and publish the results in the same language, or, looking for a wider and international readership, in English or French. The situation in the last decades has changed to a degree that is not negligeable: Hispanic American authors now publish sometimes in Portuguese in Brazilian journals and Brazilians publish in Spanish-language journals, regardless of the mutual intelligibility of these two languages. Some articles in Portuguese have appeared in Spanish-language journals (5), whereas 31 Spanish articles appeared in Brazilian journals. No other languages of publication have surfaced. In addition, we see practically all issues of these journals – all Mexican journals being the exception – as having a multinational authorship. This still may not be a general or majoritarian trend, but there is apparently a pattern of looking for ‘international’ journals in the community of scholars, and this does not necessarily mean English-language ones. We see the boundaries of nationalised cultures of scholarship, as they have largely emerged since the late nineteenth century, as being somewhat eroded.

Are these trends only because of the revolution of digitalisation and growing international entanglements? Or does this instead show an aspect of the beneficial tyranny of politics in the sense that a stronger Latin American connection is part of the recent progressive political movements? Any attempt to answer this question must consider both aspects. Digital infrastructure and easy communication across borders are certainly major factors in this development. Yet the very idea that, based on Spanish–Portuguese mutual intelligibility, a kind of alternative ‘internationality’ – a particular construction of the international⁴⁸ – is possible is certainly a practical and no less important political question. The sense of shared identities, political projects and political conjunctures may have been the driving force for overcoming the low threshold created by national boundaries. For instance, a contribution entitled ‘Imperialismo e Educação’ discusses the Inter-American Conferences on Education from 1943 to 1963.⁴⁹ As a subsidiary factor, we can imagine that political situations may play a role in this emerging configuration of publishing. We discuss this possibility through three emergent trends that we see in our sample of articles.

First, the thematic differentiation of scholarship is noteworthy. Whereas some decades ago general analysis of national, regional or local histories of compulsory and elite schooling dominated the landscape, including analyses of pioneering or leading individual institutions, now the variety of subjects displays the regular expansion of a consolidated field. Now pre-school, vocational and adult education play an increasing role in the articles. The refinement of school history is also evident, as shown in articles about rituals, the teaching of specific subjects, body cultures and sensibilities. Nonetheless, the long tradition of interpreting education from the vantage point of national political life is still pervasive, as seen, for instance, in the last special issues of the Brazilian journals examining the process of political independence on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Brazilian independence. Yet this differentiation began long before progressive movements gained territory after the turn of the century, so we do not see the fact of this thematic and methodological differentiation as particularly entangled with the recent political environment.

Second, more immediate political circumstances are rather effectual when we investigate the question of the multicultural shape of Latin American societies as well as the question of gender. Due to space constraints we shall only briefly address the first question. For instance, one contribution treats the changing constellations between sports and native peoples against the background of the Juegos Mundiales de los Pueblos Indígenas (world championship of indigenous populations).⁵⁰ Particularly in Brazil, the political recognition of racial identities and projects marked new paths of scholarship, so that a recent contribution specifically addresses the state of the art on black populations and schools,⁵¹ something almost impossible two decades ago due to the relative lack of specific scholarship. And it is not only the question of indigenous and ‘coloured’ groups in all their variety that points to discussions concerning the ethnic and cultural plurality of these countries; a further differentiation of whiteness is also under way. Portrayed for a long time as a kind of ‘normal population’, the white population and its miscegenation are now being considered more specifically, differentiating older colonial from newer migrant whites and, among the latter, specific migrant communities.⁵² If we see some impact of these themes advanced by progressive political forces in the region in the work of scholars, this does not mean that all these contributions may be ascribed to the larger political environments. A cautious note regarding the newer significance of these research themes is necessary: Mexico is, considering its tradition of anthropological scholarship and ethnohistory, an exception to the idea that a more intensive consideration of ethnic pluralities in the field of history of education may be motivated by newer political progressive environments. Themes such as the early colonial missions sent to different indigenous groups are indeed present in our sample, but this is rather a sign of a longer tradition of scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.

Third, a stronger focus on comparative and international perspectives and knowledge transfer is also noticeable, particularly when compared with the localist and nationalist framing of many histories of education in the twentieth century. For instance, an analysis of a study mission by Brazilian educators to Uruguay shows transfer entanglements that are not patterned in the usual North–South perspective.⁵³ Similarly, well-known published sources of national provenance are being interpreted from the viewpoint of ‘global transfer’.⁵⁴ Do these articles and others, for instance comparative approaches,⁵⁵ hint at a stronger regional integration of research, a kind of correlate of progressive and political projects aiming at common interests and a common history? We do not think so, at least not as a major factor. Of course, well-established discourses concerning commonalities in the respective histories, the challenges all these countries have and have had to face – particularly, the influence of the United States – and other factors may have contributed to a shared sense of identity that may inform some of this research. Additionally, a further factor for internationalisation may also be related to the previously mentioned pressure of ‘becoming international’ that is built into the national systems of evaluation with which researchers have to deal. Yet we do think that the main factor is the increasing sophistication of research, including the unearthing of ‘foreign’ archives, sometimes available online, or the more international outlook of discussions and perspectives. Again, digitalisation is part of the history of the steady growth of a more transnational perspective. This sophistication of educational historiography is also seen in the wealth of contributions addressing historiographical balances, scrutinising specific research fields and methodological discussion, which is also present in the sample.

In short, we can still identify research related to what we have called the beneficial tyranny of politics in recent scholarship. Yet these trends are limited to certain thematic innovations, particularly ethnic and cultural plurality as well as gender, issues that are being hotly contested in the region. But recent historiography is also being shaped by powerful shifts not directly related to politics. For instance, the digital environment of research and the connections between scholarly communities seems to favour the emergence of new trends identified in our sample such as comparative and transfer analysis. Of course, this newer interest may also be related to the stronger connections between Latin American countries both on the more progressive and the more conservative sides. Yet there is nothing equivalent to the European Union, for instance, as a supranational educational space motivating research questions in this direction. In this sense, the beneficial, productive tyranny of politics seems to have receded somewhat in the process of professionalisation of research. Now, historiographies of the transnational, of societal pluralism, and an enhanced sense of theories and methodologies simply belong to the working of the academic sphere and cannot be reduced to politics as a main frame for scholarly work. Whereas the beneficial tyranny of politics as a thesis still works for the history of educational historiography, analyses focused on our present may uncover much larger territories of scholarly endeavour.

Historiographical trends in the new millennium

The institutionalisation of the history of education in the sphere of higher education did have a specific impact on how the discipline works. The strong link between politics and history of education was pervasive and is still felt in specific developments. Until the 1980s, scholars privileged the nation-state (and, in federal countries, sometimes, the federal states) as quasi-natural contexts of educational development and change. Both local and transnational contexts have come to the forefront and have helped to renew strongly nationalised narratives. Similarly, in this new context as a university discipline, all historiographical turns in the last decades (linguistic, affective, spatial, material) have taken place to a varying degree. Lastly, the impact of feminist and gender perspectives is also evident and has developed only in the last few decades.

The last trend towards a gendered history of education will surely expand following the massive movements problematising the question of gender justice in the region including women, trans-persons and sexual minorities. In contrast, a historical analysis of the construction of Latin American masculinities has hitherto received less attention and will probably emerge as a complementary issue to this general trend. The question of the singularity of Latin American countries, addressed by the historiography of education implicitly when discussing the category of ‘popular education’, remains a crucial issue of political significance, but newer insights regarding ‘coloniality’ and the postcolonial condition are gaining traction, changing a predominantly nationalistic narrative. One major challenge that is related and affects all historiographies in Latin America is the reconsideration of big processes and the transformations of schooling and education from the viewpoint of an eccentric Latin American position within the hierarchies of global academia. What does the history of childhood look like from a ‘Southern’ point of view? How can Latin America deal with the traditions of teaching and learning inherited from older times, even in the classical tradition? Are only Europeans and North Americans entitled to advance analyses and narratives of the big traditions of the educational past? Or do Latin American historians of education have something to say not only about their countries and their region, but also about the United States, Europe, the colonial experiences in Asia and Africa, etc.? A few authors have dared to address bigger issues going well beyond Latin America in an original manner, like Carlos Ernesto Noguera did working from a long perspective on Christian discourses of teaching and learning, including their further development in different national traditions of ‘pedagogic government’.⁵⁶ Until recently, financial constraints for research may have impeded more global analysis from the viewpoint of this region. Digitalisation and a vibrant research field may also be beneficial in this respect.

In recent years, new global historiographical tendencies based on the affective turn have impacted Latin American academia to different degrees. Emotions, affect and aesthetics have become issues that have caught the attention of researchers.⁵⁷ Along with the opening of new fields of interest and an enrichment of the cultural history of education, there is a risk that the history of sensibility, affections or emotions in education may become only a fashionable field of study, with excessive emphasis on subjectivity, if it does not pay attention to conflicts such as hegemonic cultural proposals, which, as they triumph, imprison other ideas and values into oblivion.⁵⁸ This remark is particularly pertinent when thinking about education in postcolonial zones such as Latin America.

Two more aspects that we consider to be at the centre of the development of a field of historical research in education, which we did not directly deduce from our sample, should be briefly referenced here too. First, historians of education in the region seem to be particularly prone to considering the social and political significance of their work. The relevance of recent history may be partly explained as a way of dealing with the difficult past of dictatorship and violence.⁵⁹ Also, the question of historiography and how some narratives of the past were embroiled with the rather traumatic collective past experiences is an identifiable concern in this field of research. Second, the institutionalisation of the history of education coincided with the coming of widespread digitalisation and this established a dominant culture of open-source publications, at least at the level of the scholarly journals in focus here. In this sense, Latin American historians of education pioneered a development that may become a model for other scholarly communities around the world.

Again, these and other emerging issues are still closely related to the strong link between politics and education. The ‘tyranny’ of politics, in this sense, was beneficial for this discipline not only in its emergence but also in its phase of institutionalisation and in the last historiographical shifts. In this sense, politicisation has not been obstructive, but rather an inspiring process for a large number of researchers in the field. Due to the impressive development of the field in the last decades, the beneficial tyranny may not be so dominant any more. The inspiration of political projects as a source for historiographical vitality is still constitutive of this scholarly field.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcelo Caruso

Marcelo Caruso is Professor for History of Education at the Institute of Education Research at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is the managing director of the Journal Paedagogica Historica. International Journal for the History of Education. His research focuses on transnational and comparative history of education and the history of school technologies.

Pablo Toro-Blanco

Pablo Toro-Blanco is Professor in the Department of History at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago de Chile. He has researched the social and cultural history of education in Chile, particularly the history of youth, student movements and emotions in educational settings.

Notes

¹ Helge Jordheim, ‘Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities’, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 151–171.

² Mariano Narodowski, ‘El lado oscuro de la luna. El temprano siglo XIX y la historiografía educacional Argentina’, in La historia de la educación en debate, ed. Rubén Cucuzza (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 1996), 269–280.

³ Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

⁴ Susanne Spieker, ‘An Early Researcher in the Field of Education: Bernardino de Sahagún in Sixteenth-Century Mexico’, History of Education 37, no. 6 (2008). Scattered references may be found in Joseph de Acosta, Historia Natural y moral de las Indias (Seville: Casa de Juan de Leon, 1590).

⁵ Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, Historia de la vide del hombre (Madrid: En la Imprenta de Aznar, 1789), 318–20; Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination. Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory 1513–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 91–117.

⁶ Marcelo Caruso, ‘To Forget Everything and to Learn Again: Postcolonial Order, Colonial Education and Legitimacy in Nineteenth Century Latin America’, in Decolonisation(s) and Education: New Men for New Polities, ed. Marcelo Caruso and Daniel Maul (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2020), 21–42.

⁷ Antonio Bachiller y Morales, Apuntes para la historia de las letras y de la instruccion publica de la Isla de Cuba, vol. 1 (Havana: Imprenta de P. Massana, 1859).

⁸ Pagden, Spanish Imperialism.

⁹ Juan María Gutiérrez, Noticias históricas sobre el orijen y el desarrollo de la enseñanza pública superior en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Siglo, 1868).

¹⁰ José Ricardo Pires de Almeida, Histoire de l’instruction publique au Brésil (1500–1889). Histoire et legislation (Rio de Janeiro: Leuzinger Ed., 1889), xiii.

¹¹ Clarice Nunes, ‘A instrução pública e a primeira história sistematizada da educação brasileira’, Cadernos de Pesquisa, no. 93 (1995): 51–9.

¹² Manuel Muro, Historia de la Instrucción Pública en San Luis Potosí (San Luis Potosí: M. Esquivel y Compañía, 1899); Enrique Herrera Moreno, Historia de la educación secundaria en el Estado de Veracruz (Jalapa: Oficina tipográfica del Gobierno del Estado, 1923).

¹³ Domingo Amunátegui Solar, El sistema de Lancaster en Chile y otros países Sud-americanos (Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1895).

¹⁴ Alberto Palomeque, El Instituto de instrucción pública en 1855 y una memoria del Dr. D. José G. Palomeque, contribución á la historia de la educación común en la República Oriental del Uruguay (Buenos Aires: Establecimiento poligráfico, 1903).

¹⁵ José Manuel Frontaura Arana, Noticias históricas sobre las escuelas públicas de Chile á fines de la era colonial (Santiago: Imprenta Nacional, 1892); José Manuel Frontaura Arana, Historia del Convictorio Carolino (Apuntes para la historia de los antiguos colegios de Chile) (Santiago: Imprenta Nacional, 1889).

¹⁶ Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Montevideo: Arca, 1998).

¹⁷ Juan P. Ramos, Historia de la instrucción primaria en la República Argentina (1810–1910), vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, 1910).

¹⁸ Antonio Portnoy, La instrucción primaria desde 1810 hasta la sanción de la ley 1420 (Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1937); Adolfo Garretón, La instrucción primaria durante la dominación española en el territorio que forma actualmente la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1939); Rosalba Aliaga Sarmiento, La instrucción primaria durante la dominación española en el territorio que forma actualmente la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1940); Luisa Buren de Sanguinetti, La instrucción primaria durante la dominación española en el territorio que forma actualmente la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos del Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1940); Abel Cháneton, La instrucción primara en la época colonial (Buenos Aires: Kraft, 1940); Antonino Salvadores, La instrucción primaria desde 1810 hasta la sanción de la ley 1420 (Buenos Aires: Talleres gráficos del Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1941); José S. Campobassi, La educación primaria desde 1810 hasta la sanción de la Ley 1420 (Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1942).

¹⁹ Primitivo Moacyr, A instrução e o imperio (subsidios para a historia da educação no Brasil), vol. 3 (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1936–1938).

²⁰ Maria Helana Camara Bastos, ‘Paroz, Compayré, Rousselot: manuales de Historia de la Educación en Circulación en Brasil (Siglo XIX)’, in La Enseñanza de la Historia de la Educaicón en Perspectiva Internacional, ed. Décio Gatti Júnior, Carlos Monarcha and Maria Helana Camara Bastos (Salamanca: FarenHouse, 2019), 199–234.

²¹ François Guex, Historia de la instrucción y de la educación (Madrid: Sucs. de Hernando, 1924).

²² Alexandre Daguet, Manual de pedagogía, seguido de un Compendio de la historia de la educación (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Cervantes, 1887).

²³ Adrián Ascolani, ‘La Enseñanza de la Historia de la Educación en Argentina y el Tránsito Hacia el Espiritualismo Católico: instituciones, currículo y actores (1900–1962)’, in La enseñanda de historia de la educación en perspectiva internacional, ed. Décio Gatti Júnior, Carlos Monarcha and Maria Helana Camara Bastos (Salamanca: FarenHouse, 2019), 11–38.

²⁴ Diana Gonçalves Vidal and Luciano Mendes de Faria Filho, ‘História da Educação no Brasil: a constituição histórica do campo (1880–1970)’, Revista Brasileira de História 23, no. 45 (2003): 37–70.

²⁵ An exception would be Luis Chávez Orozco, a teacher by training turned historian and a participant in the project for a ‘Socialist education’ in Mexico in the 1930s: La educación pública elemental en la ciudad de México durante el siglo XVIII (Mexico City: SEP, 1936).

²⁶ Guillermo Furlong, Nacimiento y desarrollo de la filosofía en el Río de la Plata, 1536–1810 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Kraft, 1947); Juan Carlos Zuretti, Historia de la educación (Buenos Aires: Itinerarium, 1956); Francisco Cantón Rosado, Historia de la instrucción pública en Yucatán. Desde fines del siglo XVI hasta fines del siglo XIX (Mexico City: Ediciones de la SEP, 1943); Luis Antonio Bohórquez Casallas, La evolución educativa en Colombia (Bogotá: Publicaciones cultural colombiana, 1956); Danielo Nieto Lozano, La educación en el Nuevo Reino de Granada (Bogotá: Editorial Santafé, 1955).

²⁷ For the case of Brazil, see Theobaldo Miranda Santos, Noções de história da educação (São Paulo: Nacional, 1945); Raul Briquet, História da Educação – Evolução do pensamento educacional (São Paulo: Renascença, 1946).

²⁸ Amanda Labarca, Historia de la enseñanza en Chile (Santiago: Imprenta Universitaria, 1939). Pablo Toro Blanco, ‘La escritura de dos historias de la educación chilena y el difícil proceso de constitución de un campo de conocimiento. José María Muñoz Hermosilla y Amanda Labarca (1918–1939)’, in História da Educação na América Latina.Ensinar & escrever, ed. José Gondra and José Claudio Sooma (Río de Janeiro: EDUERJ, 2011), 265–83.

²⁹ Lorenzo Luzuriaga, Historia de la educación y la de la pedagogía (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1959), 9.

³⁰ Luis A. Bohórquez Casallas, La evolución educativa en Colombia (Bogotá: Cultural Colombiana, 1956).

³¹ Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, Historia de la pedagogía como historia de la cultura (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1970).

³² Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, ‘El proceso de la Educación en el Virreinato’, in Nueva Historia de Colombia (Bogotá: Planeta, 1989); Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, ‘Educación durante los gobiernos liberales 1936–1946’, in Nueva Historia de Colombia (Bogotá: Planeta, 1989), 207–15.

³³ Franscico Larroyo, Historia Comparada de la Educación en México (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1947).

³⁴ Juan Carlos Tedesco, Educación y sociedad en la Argentina (1880–1945), ed. Gregorio Weinberg and Dimensión Argentina (Buenos Aires: Solar, 1986). See Bolivia Faustino Suárez Arnez, Historia de la educación en Bolivia (La Paz: Talleres de la editorial Trabajo, 1963).

³⁵ Elsie Rockwell, Hacer escuela, hacer estado. La educación posrevolucionaria vista desde Tlaxcala (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán/CIESAS/CINVESTAV, 2007); Alberto Mayor Mora, Cabezas duras y dedos inteligentes. Estilo de vida y cultura técnica de los artesanos colombianos del siglo XIX (Medellín: Hombre Nuevo, 2003).

³⁶ Engracia Loyo, Gobiernos revolucionarios y educación popular en México, 1911–1928 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1999).

³⁷ Pablo Rodríguez and Maria Emma Mannarelli, eds., Historia de la infancia en América Latina (Bogotá: Universidad del Externado, 2007).

³⁸ See, for instance, Inés Dussel, Currículum, humanismo y democracia en la enseñanza media (1863–1920) (Buenos Aires: CBC-UBA/FLACSO, 1997); Claudio Gutiérrez, Educación, ciencias y artes en Chile, 1797–1843. Revolución y contrarrevolución en las ideas y políticas (Santiago: RIL, 2011).

³⁹ Fernando de Azevedo, A cultura brasileira: introdução ao estudo da cultura no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Serviço Gráfico do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografía e Estatística, 1943); José F. Martínez Díaz, Historia de la educación pública en Cuba (Pinar del Rio: Imprenta Casa Villalba, 1943).

⁴⁰ Gregorio Weinberg, Modelos educativos en la historia de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Kapelusz, 1984); Adriana Puiggrós, La educación popular en América Latina. Orígenes, polémicas y perspectivas (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1984); Adriana Puiggrós, Imperialismo y educación en América Latina (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1980); Carlos Tünnermann, Historia de la Universidad en América Latina. De la época colonial a la Reforma de Córdoba (San José de Costa Rica: EDUCA, 1991); Gabriela Ossenbach, ‘Las transformaciones del Estado y de la educación pública en América Latina en los siglos XIX y XX’, in Escuela, historia y poder. Miradas desde América Latina, ed. Alberto Martínez Boom and Mariano Narodowski (Buenos Aires: Novedades Educativas, 1996), 121–147; Renate Marsiske, Movimientos estudiantiles en la historia de América Latina, 2 vols (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdes & UNAM/CESU, 1999), 121–48.

⁴¹ Gabriela Ossenbach, ‘Research into the History of Education in Latin America: Balance of the Current Situation’, Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 3 (2000): 841.

⁴² A synthesis of the point of view of those who supported this purpose is found in the article by Soto-Arango, Diana Elvira, Mora-García, José Pascual y Lima-Jardilino and José Rubens, ‘La historia de la educación en América Latina: contribución y aportes de la Sociedad de Historia de la Educación Latinoamericana -– SHELA (1994–2015)’, Revista História da Educação, 21, no. 51 (2017): 351–75.

⁴³ ‘Prólogo con epílogo’, in Dictaduras y utopías en la historia reciente de la educación Argentina (1955–1983), ed. Adriana Puiggrós (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna, 1997), 21–42.

⁴⁴ Veinte años del Movimiento Pedagógico. Entre mitos y realidades (Bogotá: Cooperative Editorial Magisterio & Corporación Tercer Milenio, 2002).

⁴⁵ Nicolás Arata and Pablo Pineau, ‘Seis dimensiones para abordar la historia de la educación en perspectiva latinoamericana’, in Latinoamérica: la educación y su hisotoria. Nuevos enfoques para su debate y enseñanza, ed. Nicolás Arata and Pablo Pineau (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Facultd de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2019), 14.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Jürgen Schriewer, ‘Multiple Internationalities: The Emergence of a World-Level Ideology and the Persistence of Idiosyncratic World-Views’, in Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities, ed. Christophe Charle, Jürgen Schriewer and Peter Wagner (Frankfurt and Main: Campus, 2004), 473–533; Peter McMahan and Daniel A. McFarland, ‘Creative Destruction: The Structural Consequences of Scientific Curation’, American Sociological Review 85, no. 2 (2021): 341–76.

⁴⁸ Jürgen Henze, Jürgen Wichmann, ‘Konstruktion von Internationalität: Referenzhorizonte pädagogischen Wissens im Wandel gesellschaftlicher Systeme (Spanien, Sowjetunion/Rußland, China)’, in Gesellschaften im Vergleich, ed. Jürgen Schriewer and Hartmut Kaelble (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 151–260.

⁴⁹ Fernando César Ferreira Gouvêa and Leandro Oliveira da Silva, ‘Imperialismo e Educação na América Latina. As Conferências Interamericanas de Educação (1943–1963)’, HistELA – History of Education in Latin America 4 (2020): 1–16.

⁵⁰ Aurelio Arnoux Narvaja, ‘El deporte, los pueblos originarios y las perspectivas ideológicas: entre el racialismo de los Juegos Olímpicos de Sain Louis (1904) y la reafirmación étnica de los Juegos Mundiales de los Pueblos Indiígenas (2015)’, HistELA – History of Education in Latin America 3 (2020).

⁵¹ Marcelo Pagliosa Carvalho, ‘Estado da arte sobre educação e relações étnico-raciais (2003–2014): História da educação de crianças e jovens negros(as)’, Revista História da Educação 34 (2020): 211–30.

⁵² Cione Marta Raasch Manske and Maria Cristina Dadalto, ‘A educção escolar de pomeranos e descendentes em Santa Maria de Jetibá (ES)’, Revista História da Educação 25 (2021): 1–30; Paula Serrao, ‘Los estudios históricos sobre la educación de los italianos en la Argentina. Temas, abordajes y algunas propuestas’, Revista mexicana de historia de la educación IX, no. 17 (2021): 69–93.

⁵³ Caroline Braga Michel, Eduardo Arriada and Gabriela Medeiros Nogueira, ‘Missão de estudos ao Uruguai: o que dizem os professores acerca do jardim de infancia’, Anuario de Historia de la Educación 21, no. 2 (2020): 87–106.

⁵⁴ Ramiro Martínez Mundaca, ‘Transferencias globales en la educación chilena: promoción del ideal democrático a través de la Revista de Educación de la Asociación de Educación Nacional (1905–1927)’, Cuadernos Chilenos de Historia de la Educación 13, no. 1 (2020): 104–28.

⁵⁵ Camila Pérez Navarro and Laura Graciela Rodríguez, ‘Las escuelas normales en Chile y Argentina (1821–1974). Un estudio comparado’, Revista mexicana de historia de la educación 9, no. 18 (2021): 1–21.

⁵⁶ Carlos Ernesto Noguera, El gobierno pedagógico. Del arte de educar a las tradiciones pedagógicas (Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2014).

⁵⁷ Collective works representative of this approach are, among others, La educación de las sensibilidades en la Argentina moderna. Estudios sobre estética escolar, ed. Pablo Pineau, María Silvia Serra and Myriam Southwell (Buenos Aires: Biblios, 2017); Katya Braghini, Kazumi Munakata and Marcus Aurelio Taborda de Oliveria, eds., Novos diálogos sobre a história da educação dos sentidos e das sensibilidades (Sao Paulo: Educ, 2020); and Heloísa Helena Pimenta Rocha and Pablo Toro Blanco, eds., Infância, juventude e emoções na história da educação (Belo Horizonte: Fino Traço 2022).

⁵⁸ Marcus Aurelio Taborda de Oliveira, ‘Educação dos sentidos e das sensibilidades: Entre a moda acadêmica e a possibilidade de renovação no âmbito das pesquisas em história da educação’, Revista História da Educação, 22 (2018).

⁵⁹ See, for instance, Inés Dussel, Silvia Finocchio and Silvia Gojman, Haciendo memoria en el país del Nunca Más (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1997).