The pedagogy of latrines. A kaleidoscopic look at the history of school bathrooms in Argentina, 1880-1930

ABSTRACT

School bathrooms are liminal spaces where notions about intimacy and one’s public persona are configured and where issues such as sex and gender are centrally experienced and proved. These learnings are partially scripted by architectural design and pedagogical rules but not fully captured by them. In this article, I intend to historicise these configurations through an analysis of the trajectories of school bathrooms in Argentina from 1880 to 1930. Grounding on sensorial and material histories of schooling and on architectural and cultural histories, I follow the thread of toilets through school plans, state regulations, photographs, architectural treatises and pedagogical reports. I claim that issues such as the height of doors, the quality of floor and wall materials, the preference for squat or flush-down toilets, or the presence or absence of windows and mirrors, became contested arenas and that they can be projected as fragments of a kaleidoscope, as proposed by Sigfried Giedion, and not as a unified narrative of progress. I conclude that educational research would benefit from paying attention to apparently insignificant elements whose refraction visibilises not the history of purity and civilisation but that of impure hybrids that contained different possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• School bathrooms
• history of education
• school architecture
• material history
• Argentina
• pedagogy of space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this and the following cases, translations from Spanish and French are my own, unless it is indicated. The novel’s English version is Martín Kohan, School for Patriots, trans. by Nick Castor (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012).

2. I take the notion of public intimacy from Giuliana Bruno’s study of the relationships of bodies and spaces through architecture and film. For her, the movie theatre and the museum are public spaces where display and promenade are bound to an intimate experience that mobilises affects and memory; this ‘spectatorial voyage’ is inherited from architecture, which first invited it (Bruno, 2007, pp. 18–19). Bruno stresses that architecture is not to be considered as a fixed construction but as a material experience of space that produces a mobilisation of the senses, for example, in seeing and being seen, that is simultaneously public and intimate; while she does not discuss bathrooms, the reference to movies connects to deeply affective experiences. Also, Rafael Blanco’s work on the intimate space of university experience and the public production of sexualised identities, which have as one of their privileged sites the public bathrooms with their interplay between visibility and secrecy, has been relevant for my own historical thinking on school bathrooms (Blanco, 2014).

3. An exception is Roger-Henri Guerrand’s study of toilets in France, which pays attention to smells, gazes, and materials and dedicates some pages to the history of school latrines, i.e. the discussion around wooden seats for toilets in late 19th century French schools (Guerrand, 1985, p. 128ff).

4. Norm Friesen, who studied the connections between both intellectuals, mentions that Benjamin quoted Giedion’s Building in France (1928) several times in his Arcades project notebooks, and that he wrote a letter to Giedion to express to him the ‘electrifying’ effect of his work (Friesen, 2016, p. 55). Giedion’s use of the notion of constellation was close to Walter Benjamin’s, and helped him to reject ‘triumphalist narratives organized around spirit, reason, production, or any other master signifier’ (Friesen, 2016, p. 60). Giedion combined the training of an art historian to that of an architect and designer, and used drawings, photographs, and advertisements to argue his case for a material history of architecture (von Moos, 1948/2013).

5. Georges Vigarello (2013) also points to this development of the bathroom as an individualised and privatised space to take care of oneself, as a space to develop a new attention and relationship with the self. He studies how the space is filled with artefacts for la toilette, like towels, soaps, mirrors, banks, and creams.

6. This view contrasts with Le Corbusier’s celebration of the WC as ‘one of the most beautiful objects ever fabricated by the industry [… that] reveals all the sensual curves of the divine human face but without its imperfections’. It was the ‘cultural peak’ of our times, which reminded him of the Victory of Samothrace because of its fine contours (as cited in Guerrand, 1985, p. 181).

7. Barnard’s report, written in 1848 and reprinted several times, stated that one of the most common errors of school buildings was the absence of ‘places of retirement for children of either sex, when performing the most private office of nature’ (Barnard, 1854, p. 16). Barnard’s observations were full of moral overtones: toilets ought to ‘promote habits of order, and neatness, and cultivate delicacy of manners and refinement of feeling’ (p. 16); instead, he found that they incited promiscuity and filthiness (p. 33). Overall, the state of school toilets was conceived as a moral and a health problem with dire consequences. The solution Barnard proposed was to build outhouses with proper isolation, secrecy, and ventilation, so as to make them worthy of ‘civilized people’ (p. 47). There was also a reference to a box of paper that was to be placed at each privy (p. 193), which is to my knowledge the first mention in treatises of school architecture about toilet paper.

8. It is relevant to note that the photos, even if they were taken at schools built in the 1880s, were produced in the 1910s. It is not possible to know, except for the regulations, whether the elevated cisterns were there in the original constructions. According to Koolhaas, elevated cisterns became popular in the 1880s (Koolhaas et al., 2014, p. 48), but they are not mentioned in the architectural treatises and reports studied.

9. These rules are significant for how they depict children’s behaviour. As Alan Hunt (1996) shows in relation to sumptuary laws, the presence of regulations can be indicative of a weak power of rule, of transgressions or challenges, which present the need to reinforce boundaries or behaviours.

10. Interestingly, one plan drew the toilets but did not name them, a silence that would be repeated in other school plans. In one case, ‘WC’ was reserved for the teacher’s bathroom, and ‘latrine’ for children’s toilets. A closer look shows that the plans designed by the architects referred to ‘latrines,’ and those by the engineers used ‘WC’ (Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1886). In other documents, the word ‘retretes’ was also used (related to a retreat or retirement).

11. Lucila da Silva found regulations in 1894–1897 that stated the need to hire cleaning personnel so that girls are not forced to clean for school waters, an act that was seen as shameful and inappropriate (2021, p. 163).

12. In the late 1950s Escardó would be the Dean of the School of medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, and during his tenure he would instal mirrors in women’s toilets so as to make them feel more welcomed (Diamant, 2007, p. 128).

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Inés Dussel

Inés Dussel is Professor at the Dept of Educational Research, Centre for Advanced Studies and Research, in Mexico City. She is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers. She has published extensively on educational history and theory. Her current research interests relate to the materiality of schooling and the history of visual technologies.