Paedagogica Historica Vol. 43, No. 6, December 2007, pp.

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Narrations and Knowledges at the Beginnings of Modern Schooling in Mexico

Josefina Granja Castro
Taylor Paedagogica 10.1080/00309230701722705 CPDH_A_272182.sgm 0030-9230 Original 2007 0 6 43 Josefina jgranja@cinvestav.mx 00000December & and GranjaCastro Article Francis (print)/1477-674X Francis Historica 2007 Ltd (online)

This article rescues a series of texts produced by schoolteachers between 1820 and 1890 in order to comply with the ruling educational authoritys request for the elaboration of reports on their institutions. These documents are located in the General Public Instruction collection of the Archivo Histrico 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.

Introduction1 Before pedagogy became established as a legitimate field of knowledge as regards the problems and processes of educationwhich in Mexico occurred during the final third of the nineteenth century2teaching methods and the school environment were constant objects of study for schoolteachers, who, in their reports on the institutions in their charge, described and made observations upon their teaching conditions.

Translation: David M. J. Wood; photography: Flavia Bonasso. 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 instruccin, 1870 and La enseanza, 1875, and with the publication of the first pedagogical treatises by Mexican authors: Manuel Flores (Elementos de educacin, 1884) and Luis E. Ruiz (Tratado elemental de pedagoga, 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 countrys first teacher training colleges were also established in these years: in Jalapa in 1886, and in the capital in 1887.
2

ISSN 0030-9230 (print)/ISSN 1477-674X (online)/07/06081919 2007 Stichting Paedagogica Historica DOI: 10.1080/00309230701722705

820 J. Granja Castro 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 knowledge that reveals the conceptual frameworks and the structures of rationality that enable us to understand early schooling in Mexico. This knowledge arises from everyday processes of observing and describing the ways in which activities were organized and carried out: for instance, number of pupils attending, materials covered in teaching, books used, methods applied, funds for the upkeep of schools, fee-paying children and pupils attending free of charge (nios de gracia), inventories of teaching tools and equipment, and attributes of the teachers who staffed the institutions (with or without a licence, with or without qualifications). This article rescues a series of texts produced by schoolteachers between 1820 and 1890 in order to comply with the ruling educational authoritys request for the elaboration of reports on their institutions. These documents are located in the Fondo Instruccin Pblica en General (IPG) of the Archivo Histrico del Distrito Federal (AHDF). The schoolteachers narrations are analysed from the perspective of their conceptual frameworks and structures of rationality.3 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 from that which was developed by the pedagogical sciences, and that is directly linked to strategies of governance.4 A Vast Nation Waiting to be Discovered The practice of generating reports and documents on the state of education and pedagogy was, throughout the nineteenth century, one of the key means of producing knowledge about the processes of schooling and teaching. These documents were written by all manner of schoolteachers and tutors who, in performing what we would now refer to as a bureaucratic task, prepared written accounts for the relevant authorities of the conditions in which teaching was carried out in their institutions. This procedure of examining the teaching environment and of documenting it in written form, employing a highly heterogeneous set of descriptive criteria, was of great relevance at that time, given Mexicos complex social fabric in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This was a period of rupture with the colonial social order, as liberals and conservatives embarked upon diverse and conflicting national projects following independence in 1821. In little over four decades the country was ruled by 28 presidents and two emperors, three constitutions were declared, there were 78

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 educacin. Mxico: Centro de Investigacin y de Estudios AvanzadosUniversidad 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: 927 and id. Vigilar y Castigar. Mxico: Siglo XXI, 1976.

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education ministers and 12 different projects were devised to organise national education policy.5 This was a time in which the dimensions and resources of this nascent country were as yet unknown: who its inhabitants were, what they did, where they lived, what diseases they suffered, how they were educated; it was an era during which the country was only just beginning to recognize itself as a national body:
The new nation would gradually awaken to reality. Its inhabited lands turned out to be less rich than Humboldts legend had claimed. The vast deserts to the north were equally as inhospitable as the forests of the Gulf region; to reach the fertile lands of the central plateau from either ocean one had to traverse labyrinthine mountain ranges that descended from the northern coasts, rendering treacherous the passage of both people and goods. Beyond, in the vast territories to the north, which only a handful of colonists, adventurers and missionaries had reached, a prodigious wealth of natural resources lay in silence. What was lacking, though, was Mexicans: not only that they might value and exploit these riches, but that they might even conceive of their very existence. As the era of independence commenced, the new country had not even a cartographical notion of its own dominions, boundaries and resources.6

In this vast nation that was waiting to be discovered, early nineteenth-century schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were the first to explore the territory of teaching, and the narrations that they have left to uswhat is referred to today as grey literature (assorted types of administrative reports7)constitute an invaluable set of descriptions both of early schooling and of the formulation of the conceptual frameworks and structures of rationality that enable us to explain the processes related to that educational endeavour. The development and evolution of the practice of report-writing reflects, to some extent, the key moments of transition in regard to the production of knowledge about the conditions of schooling and teaching during the nineteenth century. Narrations at the Beginnings of Schooling The events that led to the production of the first reports on schooling conditions sought to resolve litigation and disputes among tutors that arose as a result of alleged violations of the regulations of their guildparticularly rule number six, which stated that any two schools should be separated by a distance of two blocks.8 To this effect there occurred a prolonged and carefully documented dispute (17421746) the subject of what is perhaps the oldest surviving record of reports

Meneses, Morales E. Tendencias educativas oficiales en Mxico 18211911. Mxico: Porra, 1983. Krauze, Enrique. Siglo de caudillos. Mxico: Tusquets, 1994: 119. 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.
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822 J. Granja Castro

Figure 1 The oldest reports concerning the conditions of teaching institutions that operated in Mexico City around 1746 Source: AHDF, Instruccin pblica en general, vol. 2475, file 6.

on conditions in teaching institutions in Mexico City during the mid-eighteenth century (Figure 1).9 The report offers a vivid account of conditions in each of the 44 teaching institutions that operated at that time. The aspects covered were: location of institution: hidden or with a public entrance; type of institution: school or amiga;10 attendance: males and/or females; and attributes of the teachers: with or without a licence, with or without qualification, purity of blood. This method of organizing knowledge can be described as a matrix based on individual peculiarities, in which the classification criteria derive from the selfsame objects that are being classified. The same rationale can be found in other reports of the period, such as the project to reform the amiga schools that was motioned by the General
Figure:1. Source AHDF, The Instruccin oldest reports pblica concerning en general, the conditions vol. 2475, of file teaching 6. institutions that operated in Mexico City around 1746

AHDF. IPG, vol. 2475, file 6. 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.
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Master of the guild, Rafael Ximeno, in 1791.11 Ximenos reform project was based on a list of the 80 girls schools that existed in Mexico City, which in each case indicated the social and moral status of each schoolmistress. Thus unique, peculiar and individual categories were applied to each mistress, with the result that no general characterizations could be made and no criteria could be applied for the sake of comparison. Between 1818 and 1825, many reports were produced in the form of messages: that is, brief replies written in a colloquial idiom and with no other formality than the schoolmasters signature (Figure 2). One of the best preserved archives of this type of text consists of a set of 86 reports written between 1820 and 1822 by teachers from parish schools, convent schools, primeras letras (literacy schools), colegios (general schools) and amigas, following a request by Mexico Citys town hall in order to organize and administer its educational department.12 In these narrations we can observe a range of categories used to describe teaching

Figure 2 School reports written by teachers in form of messages between 1820 and 1822 Source: AHDF, Instruccin pblica en general, vol. 2477, file 250. AHDF. IPG, vol. 2476, file 50. 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 educacin ilustrada 17861836. Mxico: El Colegio de Mxico, 1998: 197.
12 11

824 J. Granja Castro conditions: number of children who go to school (without yet distinguishing between children registered and children attending); attributes of those attending school (fee-paying children and de gracia children, that is, those who attended free of charge); branches of learning (specified as reading, writing, arithmetic and doctrine); books used for teaching; method followed (the term method having a wide range of implications: the organization of the school, the sequence of activities through the day, procedures followed in teaching, contents taught, etc.); funds for maintaining the school (distinguishing clearly between public and private funds). In requests for information on schools locations, individual details such as street, number, and forename and surname of the headteacher were still frequently asked for, but at the same time a new criterion came into use for organizing and grouping these individual details: the distribution of schools by districts. Although Mexico City had been divided into districts since 1786 for public administration purposes (security, sanitation, levying of taxes, etc.), it was not until 1831 that this public organization infrastructure came into use in order to take account of teaching activities. A document has survived from that yeardirected not towards teachers, as had previously been the case, but towards the aldermenrequesting the dispatch of reports on the primary instruction institutions in their respective districts.13 Between March and April, reports were received from 14 of the citys 32 districts. Of particular interest in the structure of these reports is the frequent use of a certain form of presenting information which treats the relevant data in a more systematic and discriminatory fashion. In their descriptions of school conditions, these documents begin to use a format of grouping information into rows and columns, each of which has a different heading relating to its referent, and which enables data to be read off their intersection. In the 1820 reports, this form of organization by charts requiring two fields of data was still unfamiliar to teachers: of a total of 66 reports received, only four used this new format. Although we can trace a transition from a descriptive logic based on the linear enumeration of singular details to a logic of organizing information into groups, this is not to suggest that the new practice immediately and radically replaced the previous ones (Figure 3). In 1842 and 1845 the aldermen received new requests for reports on their respective districts; many of the replies were composed by the schoolteachers, who continued to use the old style of reporting in the form of messages. Texts from 1853 and 1857, requesting information from teachers working in municipal and non-municipal schools, were produced in an array of styles, some coming in the form
Figure:2. Source AHDF, School Instruccin reports written pblica by enteachers general,in vol. form 2477, of messages file 250. between 1820 and 1822

13

AHDF. IPG, vol. 2478, file 299.

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Figure 3 In school reports around 1831 a new criterion came into use for organizing and grouping the information: the distribution of schools by districts Source: AHDF, Instruccin pblica en general, vol. 2478, file 326.

Source Figure:3. AHDF, In school Instruccin reports pblica arounden 1831 general, a new vol. criterion 2478, came file, 326. into use for organizing and grouping the information: the distribution of schools by districts

of brief reports, while others were presented as charts following diverse systems of ordering and prioritizing data. In these texts, traces of artisanal and artistic practices on the part of tutors manifested in the use of finely crafted calligraphystand side by side with emerging forms of modern rationality expressed through such features as the use of charts and lists for presenting information. In the long term, the introduction of such graphic devices was symptomatic of new ways of organizing and classifying knowledge that

826 J. Granja Castro depended on a higher degree of abstraction and allowed a greater possibility for creating such generalizations as required by government.14 Classifying, Relating, Comparing: Towards the Knowledge of Modern Schooling The districts had already employed this logic of producing knowledge on the basis of differentiating, grouping and relating for some time in their reports on various aspects of public administration in the city: the provision of goods, taxpayers censuses, population censuses, administration of hospitals, prisons, army, etc. As they began to elaborate reports on educational institutions too, the production of knowledge about schools came into contact with a rationality that the educational sphere had not, until then, developed internally. The Boletines de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografa y Estadstica15 attest that by the nineteenth century several fields of scientific knowledge, including Botany and Zoology, already employed detailed taxonomies based on the notions of class, genus and species. The production of information about populations had also developed a classificatory logic. In Mexico, for instance, a taxonomy had been used since the colonial era that distinguished sectors of the population by race: Spanish, Indian, Black, Chinese and natives of the Philippines, as well as the mixings between them, from which almost 20 different racial types had emerged. However, this rationality and the conceptual frameworks that sustained it had not spread beyond the scientific milieu that had produced it; at least it was not in evidence in the production of knowledge about schooling during the first decades of the nineteenth century. By contrast, the modes of organizing knowledge that emerged out of the need to obtain information for the purposes of public governance gained a wider reach in such spheres as the organization and administration of cities. In these
Goody, Jack. Capacidad de escribir y clasificacin: al resolver las tablas and Qu hay en una lista? In id. La domesticacin del pensamiento salvaje. Madrid: Akal, 1985. Goodys 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 dciles in Foucaults 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 educacin en los discursos cientficos de Mxico en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Revista Mexicana de Investigacin Educativa VII, no.14 (2002): 15579.
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environments we can observe a tendency towards forms of rationality that were based on classification and differentiation, and which would go on to influence the production of knowledge about schooling. The keeping of population registers had been a widespread practice since the beginning of the nineteenth century, including such details as age, sex, marital status, race, descriptions of population movements both in general and by gender (for instance birth and death rates), as well as comparisons between births and deaths, including types and causes of deaths organized by age and sex.16 The first censuses to be requested specifically for the purpose of gathering information on schools were not carried out until nearly the end of the century.17 Likewise, the registers of population flows organized by groups with common characteristics, which had been employed since the beginning of the century to provide detailed descriptions of internal movements such as those involving hospitals and prisons, are not found in accounts of processes related to schools until the second half of the nineteenth century.18 It is both intriguing and curious that even though this conceptual framework of separating, classifying and organizing into hierarchies according to uniform criteria was already in existence, its influence was so slow to filter through to the logic of producing knowledge about schooling: while the population censuses had been carried out since the end of the eighteenth century, it was almost another hundred years until school censuses came into use. 19
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 demografa histrica. In Tendencias actuales de la historia social y demogrfica, by C. Cardoso. Mxico: Sep-Setentas, 1976: 2942. 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 Jurez 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 Guerea and Viao, countries such as Spain had been carrying out censuses for educational ends since late 1790, see: Guerea, Jean-Louis, and Viao Frago Antonio. Estadstica escolar, proceso de escolarizacin y sistema educativo nacional en Espaa 17501850. Boletn de la Sociedad de Demografa Histrica XVII, no. II (1999): 11540. 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 nationstates. See: Weinberg, Gregorio. Modelos educativos en la historia de Amrica Latina. Buenos Aires: Comisin Econmica para Amrica LatinaUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1995.

828 J. Granja Castro Crucial to the attempt to understand the internal working of schools is the period around 1850, when standardized formats were first used for the gathering of information. For example in 1850, the Town Hall sent out a public order for the mistresses of municipal girls schools to send in monthly reports on their institutions. The following pieces of information were requested: number of girls who attended during the last month; girls who attended regularly and girls who did not attend; reasons for irregular attendance; subjects studied; pupils progress and marks, expressed as very good, good, average and bad; evaluations of moral and social conduct, notes of unmotivated and incorrigible pupils. One final instruction was given: in order that the information be provided in a systematic and constant fashion, a table is attached that should serve as a template.20 From this moment on we can detect an ongoing transformation in the way in which reports were produced, with an increasing and ever more widespread use of standard formats for the descriptions of schools conditions. Report requests were dispatched together with precise instructions as to how the data required should be provided. It was possibly the need to gain a tighter rein over such schools, which were both numerous and uncontrolled, that encouraged the authorities to request more precise reports, for the purposes of which specific methods of registering and documenting data were established. It was not until 1864 that the use of the enclosed template (description of the headings for the requested information) and the printed outline (the form to be filled in) first became widespread. This innovation was justified in the following terms:
that these reports be as precise and complete as necessary, that they be regularized in order that they might be employed as part of a general set of statistics, and in order to reorganize public instruction in all its aspects.

In relation to the printed outlines, the following is added:

in order to facilitate and regularize this work, I enclose printed outlines that are identical to the template, wherein the boxes should be completed in the terms expressed by their relevant headings, ensuring that all data are provided with the greatest possible clarity and precision.21

The data required were clearly expressed by the column headings: number of inhabitants; number of boys schools, private and public; number of boys in attendance; number of girls schools, private and public; number of girls in attendance; number of tutors; salaries earned; branches of teaching; funds that maintain the schools.

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.

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This type of format was significant in so far as it introduced and made familiar a style of reporting information that implied a major development in terms of the establishment of shared criteria and common mechanisms. The recommendations and actions brought about by this new practice made a spirited contribution to the formulation of significant changes in the ways in which schooling conditions were described towards the second half of the nineteenth century. For the analytical purposes of this article, the interest in the ways in which statistical knowledge was used to describe the population is in no way linked to the exact quantification that might be achieved by the application of scientific tools. It is now known that statistics produced in the nineteenth century were imprecise. In 1847 Jos M. Lafragua, the Minister for Public Education, presented a report based on data provided by the Institute for Geography and Statistics, which led him to conclude that the Mexican nation leads Prussia and all of the European nations in the number of persons able to read and write.22 According to any criteria of precision, accuracy and validity, such descriptions are utterly worthless. The interest here in the organization of data through the elaboration of statistics is connected to the progress that this practice promoted in terms of analytical and classificatory thinking: the identification of similarities, the ordering of differences, the establishment of patterns, the definition of hierarchies, the establishment of comparisons, etc. Around 1885, the process that had begun with the templates and outlines evolved into a more extensive, systematic enterprise with the more prevalent use of statistical charts. For the final 15 years of the century sustained production of such materials is recorded (1884, 1887, 1890, 1892, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896), which introduced a crucial continuity in terms of the information recorded. One event related to this process of acquiring an adequate conceptual and analytical framework was the publication in 1875 of Jos Daz Covarrubiass study La instruccin pblica en Mxico, considered to be Mexicos first modern statistical survey of schooling.23 Daz Covarrubias, Minister for Public Education from 1872 to 1876, took on the task of compiling all the countrys information on teaching, with the aim of discovering the real state of that area, accounting for its needs and attending to them, and in order that the 1840 data should not continue to be published abroad. Daz Covarrubiass study displays the use of specific forms of classification in describing processes related to schools and teaching. Despite this, uncharted categories of knowledge remain and there are allusions to missing data: there is no specific census of children of the age and aptitude to attend school. This piece of information, which was necessary to quantify the population served,
22

The source study for this report was entitled Poblacin (Population). It provided such information as was available at that time on Mexicos population, covering the following categories: censuses carried out to date, population by sexes, moral statistics or criminality, and state of popular instruction. Boletn de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografa y Estadstica I, 1841. 23 Spain produced its first complete official statistics on teaching in 1850. See: Guerea and Viao, Estadstica escolar.

830 J. Granja Castro was inferred using estimates generally accepted as statistical regularities, which were adopted even in other countries. According to this system, it was concluded that the number of children of the age and aptitude to attend school represented one fifth of the population, and that the age group for primary education was from 6 to 13 years old. The publication of this study contributed significantly to the consolidation in the social imaginary of the need for increasingly accurate tools and instruments to elucidate the processes and practices related to school teaching.24 The localized efforts on the part of Mexico Citys authorities to contribute towards this mode of conceptualizing information continued. An order issued in 1884, requesting data relating to institutions of primary and secondary instruction, included the charts on which the data were to be recorded, as well as an extensive and detailed explanation of the procedure to be followed for filling them in, giving descriptions and definitions of each of the elements requested (Figure 4): name and category of institution; subjects covered by the teaching programme and text books used; category of teachers and auxiliary employees; current salaries of each; number of pupils currently registered, by sex; average monthly attendance, by sex; ages; number of pupils registered in the year, boarders and day pupils; teaching methods followed; moral education; physical education; whether or not teaching is free of charge; administrative and security authorities; schools total expenditure on instruments, tools and accessories; sources of funding for institutions expenditures; observations. The charts also included a series of marginal notes defining what should be understood by each of these elements, thereby displaying a vital endeavour to create a shared set of notions and concepts for describing the organization and functioning of schools.25 By tracing the development of these texts throughout the nineteenth century we can observe certain changes in their composition and content. As regards the materials composition and forms of elaboration, we can perceive what Antonio Santoni identifies as the transition from the artisanal workshop to a manufacturing-style order26 in the passage from the reports in the form of colloquial messages and presented with an intricate calligraphy with the appearance of outlines or uniform templates, and latterly, statistical charts on which the teacher had only to fill in boxes. Yet if serial production resulted in the loss of the artisanal facet of teachers practices, it also gave rise to an important process of generating information that could be classified, compared and systematized, such as required by modernity. This
Figure:4. Source AHDF, Statistical Instruccin chartspblica at finalen century general, years vol. 2493, file 1703.

Daz Covarrubias, Jos. La instruccin pblica en Mxico. Mxico: 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. Gonzlez Navarro, M. Estadsticas sociales del porfiriato. Mxico: Talleres Grficos de la Nacin, 1956: 45. 26 Santoni Rugiu, Antonio. Nostalgia del maestro artesano. Mxico: Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1994.

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Figure 4 Statistical charts at final century years Source: AHDF, Instruccin pblica en general, vol. 2493, file 1703.

phenomenon contributed to a shift of rationalities within the field of knowledge on schools and teaching: from the texts produced from the end of the eighteenth century to those written in the final third of the nineteenth we can identify a transition in the forms of generating knowledge, moving from modes of knowledge based on particular, individual and subjective parameters towards forms of organizing knowledge that were grounded on increasingly uniform, homogeneous, communal and objective criteria. Alongside these transitions in the modes of reporting information came a change in the contents of knowledge, with layers of differentiation and specialization becoming evident within existing concepts. We can also detect the emergence of new notions that came into use in order to ascertain conditions in teaching institutions: from imprecise terms such as number of children who go to school to concepts allowing a greater degree of differentiation, such as average monthly attendance, children of school age, from descriptions based on wholly singular criteria (pupils performance described with such adjectives as very motivated, makes no progress, unmotivated, excellent, students progress measured in terms of what lesson each pupil had reached in the various subjects: subtraction, the basic syllables, story number 20, etc.) to typologies based on commonly shared criteria (grade scales that established levels, albeit not definitive: very good, good, average, bad; the definition

832 J. Granja Castro of the learning to be achieved in each class, etc.) It is on this transition that a significant part of our understanding of modern schooling is based. For the State, the information gathered in these reports translated into increased knowledge and a greater capacity for controlling and directing the space of the school and its protagonists. Internal school affairs became visible for the first time, and they gradually came to form part of the public sphere. These transitions in the ways reports were produced cast writing as a communication tool that promoted a greater formalization of norms and regulations, a more depersonalized mode of interaction, long-distance communication, and the generation of information that could be accumulated and stored in order to aid decision-making and subsequent reflection.27 As such, a link might be detected between, on the one hand, the writing of reports that were decreasingly subjective and increasingly standardized, and on the other, the processes of rationalization that characterize modernity and the buttressing of nation-states. Another parallel factor in the epistemological movement from subjective narrations towards standardized reports was the reception of modernizing ideas from Europe, particularly Spain and France. In the case dealt with here, this conceptual permutation can be traced back to various sources: the monographs and descriptive studies on the state of education in Mexico published in the Bulletins of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics, Daz Covarrubiass first national statistical survey, the pedagogical journals and periodicals that proffered the first lessons in Pedagogy to Mexicos teachers or the debates at the First National Congress of Public Education whose resolutions on such crucial concepts as method and compulsory education defined the nature of national education for the next (twentieth) century. These spaces, through which ideas of modernization were circulated and distributed, betraysome more clearly than otherssome features of what Roldn defines as transplanted knowledge: that is, a form of knowledge that is brought in from outside and its benefits absorbed, rather than an original knowledge actually being created or produced.28 In the case of the processes of teaching and schooling, ideas of modernization in a sense had a normative and applied function as regards the definition of criteria.29

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 Roldn Vera, Eugenia. The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence: Education and Knowledge Transmission in Transcontinental Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 29 Daz Covarrubiass 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 Mexicos 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.

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Paedagogica Historica Categories for Reflecting on Modern Schooling: Two Examples

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The forms of describing and conceptualizing various aspects of the school population during the nineteenth century, traced through notes, reports and statistics, enable us to envisage a process of change and conceptual differentiation that was crucial in the construction of modern schooling. The complexity of this task, from both an epistemological and a practical point of view, can be better appreciated if we consider the difficulties involved in forging a system of classification that could encompass the entirety of boys, girls and youths whose ages varied between 5 and 16 years and who moved intermittently from one educational institution to another, and that could discriminate between them on the basis of the level of learning obtained, at a time when there were still no clear parameters to define either the duration or the contents of each level of primary education.30 Such notions as registered, enrolled and attendance, used interchangeably in the reports written from 1820 to 1822, would go on to acquire their own distinct definitions in texts produced over the following decade, when the differentiation between registered and attendance became commonplace. In 1836 a teacher reported that in his school the number of children on our lists had risen to 300 but only 120 attended, and even then with a great deal of variation from one day to the next, in spite of my reprehensions, interviews and insinuations towards the parents.31 At the same time explanations of the causes of irregular attendance became more frequent. For the first time information was requested with the express purpose of documenting this specific problem affecting the school environment, and the attendance registers that were requested periodically and en masse from all of the schools in Mexico City still survive. The links between the attendance/non-attendance and the progress (advances) of the enrolled pupils were already in evidence in the reports written in 18351836, although only nominally so. They are mentioned sporadically in reports from 1840, while in the 1866 records their presence is clearly associated with the endeavour to establish causal connections between the two categories. A process of rationalization was undoubtedly under way based on systematic quantifications that could elucidate the scale of irregular school attendance and its causes. This was one of the eras most salient problems and one that would lead to the proposal of the principle of compulsory education. Another central part of this process was related to the category of school age. The evolution of this category played a crucial role in the standardization of schooling systems as structures of teaching stages and sequences. For a good part of the century
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.
30

834 J. Granja Castro the classification of learning referred to the level of ability that each child had reached, giving rise to a thoroughly heterogeneous set of descriptions that did now allow for teaching groups to be defined. It was only towards the end of the century that homogeneous and commonly shared classification criteria began to take effect, including precisely the category of ages of those in attendancea category that would be superfluous within a more rational organization with a firmer grip on schooling practices. Some reports from 1836 and 1857 included this information, but it was not employed in a systematic fashion or with the purpose of ordering and classifying the school population that it would develop towards the end of the century. The grouping of school populations manifested in those documents was carried out mainly in relation to subject areas, classes and the amount that each pupil had learnt at the time of reporting. Neither age nor the duration of each course was taken as a unit for classification. By 1884, age was already included in the statistical charts and sorted into ranges: under 10 years, between 11 and 15 years, and over 15 years.32 The age ranges established to describe the school population were frequently redefined. In 1890 a statistical document adjusted the classifications so as to include the youngest children: under 5 years, between 5 and 10 years, between 10 and 15 years, and over 15 years.33 The debates during the First Congress of Public Education (18891890), which set out, among many other matters, to agree on the age of compulsory education, display the complex process by which this fundamental aspect of modern schooling was constituted. The arguments put forward reveal the plethora of rationalities at work: from commonsense knowledge about the peculiarities of the Mexican race and customs to comparisons with the categories used by other countries in establishing the age of compulsory education.34 The Public Education Law of 1891, an upshot of the deliberations of the Congress, decreed that the age of compulsory education should be from 6 to 12 years.35 The question of who and who not to teach was not the only one under consideration. Another salient matter under discussion was that of how to teach. Thus another category for reflecting on modern schooling was that of method. In the 1820 reports, references to method are made indiscriminately to describe diverse aspects of school organization: distribution of classes during the school day, sequence of activities to foment better learning, books used, type of funds used for upkeep, and school organization. The question of method was one of the central themes of the pedagogical knowledge of the era that circulated in Mexico through such journals
AHDF. IPG, vol. 2493, file 1703. AHDF. IPG, vol. 2503, file 2509. 34 Debates del Congreso Nacional de Instruccin Pblica. Mxico: Imprenta del Partido Liberal, 1889. 35 The notion of school agea 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, Rubn. De Congreso a Congreso. Crnica del Primer Congreso Pedaggico Argentino. Buenos Aires: Besana, 1986.
33 32

Paedagogica Historica

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as La voz de la Instruccin (1870) and La Enseanza (1875). These publications, which disseminated the most advanced ideas from Europe, frequently raised such topics as didactics, school organization, and different types of teaching systems and methods. The notion of method gradually became differentiated from organizational matters, and towards the final decades of the century it appeared consistently as the set of procedures that should be followed in the teaching of each subjectthat is, it no longer encompassed concerns of the running and organization of schools, being restricted to issues related to the process of acquiring knowledge and the art of transmitting it. In the long term, the specific definition that the term method acquired in contrast to organizational issues implied a greater differentiation between the various fields of schooling, and the possibility of distinguishing between problems of didactics and those relating to organization. But if on the one hand this development gave rise to crucial ways of discerning between the various aspects of the scholastic sphere, on the other it occasioned an irrepressible multiplication of typologies that, far from refining the notion, merely confused it. There were specific methods for each subject,36 and even different methods for public and private schools.37 Complaints about the profound sense of anarchy with regard to the methods and procedures used in teaching were by no means few and far between. There was a pressing need to establish commonly shared definitions that could be used on a practical level in respect of this fundamental area of schooling: that is, in respect of the experience drawn on by school teachers and authorities, since in the field of pedagogical knowledge the concept was clearly defined. The problem of method was also one of the subjects debated during the Congresses of Public Education held in the closing years of the nineteenth century. The resolutions adopted recommended that the intuitive method should be espoused in its five forms: presentation of the object in natura; use of models and scientific instruments; use of prints, drawings and images projected with optical apparatuses; use of diagrams; and lively, graphic descriptions. One of the most celebrated polemics was that which tried to establish whether lecciones objetivas (objective lessons)38 constituted a subject area or a method. This was no sterile debate, since there was a tendency among schools to include object lessons as a subject to be studied, rather than taking them as a teaching method. The Congresss recommendations, laid out with some precision, stated that lecciones objetivas were popular forms of referring to the objective teaching method that was based on experimentation and intuition, but which by no means could be considered as a sequenced unit of contents or a subject area.
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.
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836 J. Granja Castro These frameworks of understanding and conceptual developments form part of the foundations upon which were built the discourses of compulsory and uniform education as central features of modern schooling.39 The establishment of the principle of compulsory education implied defining the contents of lessons as mandatory, as well as defining the age ranges of those who were obliged to attend school, and as such that principle could only be determined once this parallel conceptual network had been developed. The principle of uniformity rested on the equivalence of contents and methods, as well as on the establishment of norms as regards organisation: school hours, length of classes, and structures of grades and stages, among other considerations. At the end of the nineteenth century the notion of a national educational system was beginning to take shape in Mexicos social imaginary. This concept was cherished by a nation-state that had been in the process of consolidation for some time, and as such undertook the major tasks that lay before the country. In this context, a national educational system denoted the aspiration to establish a common set of guiding principles for primary education across the entire country: uniform, secular, free and compulsory. It was stressed that the nation-state should extend the benefits of elementary education to all sectors of the population that remained on the margins of the enlightenment of instruction.40 At this point the notion of systematization was defined in terms of the common organizational and ideological features that informed the functioning of primary instruction throughout the country. It was not until decades later, following the Revolution, that another sense of systematization was explicitly put forward, consisting of the gradual evolution of a group of institutions vaguely defined within a network of differentiated and functionally interrelated institutions.41

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 Mexicos illiteracy rate was 83%, and in 1899 only 30% of school-age children attended school. Meneses Morales, Tendencias educativas oficiales, 854. 41 Mller 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 Mller 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. Mller, Detlef, Fritz Ringer, and Brian Simon. The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction 18701920. 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.

Paedagogica Historica Concluding Remarks

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In the texts produced during the period covered in this article, we can discern a number of different rationalities and conceptual frameworks used in describing the emerging processes of schooling, and in classifying and ordering its components. The impulse to abandon a style of reporting informed by a rationality based on individual cases is one of the most clearly observable features of schoolteachers narrations during the period under analysis. On the one hand, the oldest narrations of the period under study display a rationality structured upon singularities or particular cases. Within this frame of understanding reality is described according to its individual components and knowledge consists of an accumulation of discrete elements. The categories that would go on to be used as units of classification did not yet function as such; rather they displayed the diversity of the particular. The forms of representation used to describe the school environment did not appeal to conceptual hierarchies, but they followed a spontaneous, linear and singular logic. Gradually a different form of rationality came to the fore, one that no longer responded to each individual case, but that applied ever more precise and regularized principles of grouping and differentiation, with recurrent conceptual frameworks that enabled not only description but also comparison and regulation. By the end of the nineteenth century this mode of producing knowledge about the school environment had become firmly established among schoolteachers producing reports. These alterations to conceptual frameworks and structures of rationality form part of the foundations of our understanding of the processes of modern schooling. The epistemological transition from subjective narrations to standardized reports formed part of a much wider process of modernization that was advanced by several factors emerging against the backdrop of the post-Independence era: the reception of modernizing ideas from Europe, the spread of homogenizing models of recordkeeping and writing, the rise and consolidation of the nation-state, the blurring of the frontiers between the public and the private, and the appearance of new forms of government and new types of relationships between governor and governed. In this epistemological context the school is constructed as a public spacea figure of modernity par excellence.

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Narrations and Knowledges at the Beginnings of Modern Schooling in Mexico

Josefina Granja Castro Online Publication Date: 01 December 2007 To cite this Article: Castro, Josefina Granja (2007) 'Narrations and Knowledges at the Beginnings of Modern Schooling in Mexico', Paedagogica Historica, 43:6, 819 837 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/00309230701722705 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230701722705

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