Session Information
Session 9, Mapping History of Education
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
13:00-14:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Ian Grosvenor
Contribution
Educational research is accustomed to treating the legal texts that are decreed and ratified through various governing bodies as direct evidence of the structure and functions of educational realities. In working from the perspective of ethnographic history, or of micro-history, a very different view of "the law" emerges. First of all, educational laws and regulations are tangible documents, pieces of paper, which may or may not have reached the archives of schools, educational boards, local legislatures, and official or historical archives. Many questions emerge from this view: How were they produced? Who drafted or wrote these laws? Who censured them? How were they changed in the process? What route did they follow from the legislative or administrative bodies that emitted them, to the actual school bureaucracies, supervisors and teachers? Who consumed them? How were they received? Who read them? To whom? Who made use of them? Copied them? Invoked them? Ignored them? In what contexts? When were they put into effect, if at all? How long did they influence the actual workings of educational realities? How were they inserted, as artifacts, in the ongoing negotiations among the multiple actors on the educational scene? In this paper I address some of these questions drawing on my archival research done in a provincial region of Mexico, on a number of state and federal reforms that took place after the Mexican Revolution (1915-1940). By treating legal documents not as descriptions of educational realities, but rather as artifacts, I have tried to trace their actual use and efficacy through the workings of the local educational bureaucracy. Findings that go against the grain of official historiography include the persistence of references to pre-revolutionary laws in letters written by communities or teachers, as well as the emergence of legal instruments well after the administrative or educational changes had been implemented, de facto. This includes the slim constitutional ground upon which the whole post- revolutionary federal educational system was built and operated between 1921 and 1934, and the absence of a federal Law of Education until 1939; by then the highly centralized federal State was strongly buttressed by other means, including coercion. By comparing series of state laws published in successive years, I also identify subtle changes in wording that are linked to the power play among a succession of administrative bodies in-the-making (for example, the inspectors' council). In some of the actual drafts, there are examples of censorship, such as the removal of the word "socialist" towards the end of the period of "socialist education" decreed in 1934 but soon abandoned. This sort of reading of legal and normative documents is based not only on "the text", but largely on the "materiality" of the law, and requires different sources. Besides obtaining the legal documents as they were actually published during the period, I have used indirect evidence of dissemination, references or uses of fragments in other documents, arguments over the interpretation of legal precedents, and in some cases, drafts containing handwritten deletions, comments and additions. The resulting landscape is not a replica of normative precepts, but rather an intermeshing of fragments of laws and regulations throughout the complex social configurations and networks that constitute educational spaces in society.
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