The thesis of this article is that the school in Chile in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries was central to the prevention of dangers related to hygiene, the degeneration of the race, and the promotion of certain types of moral habits. In this context, the concern to establish in Chile an educational system that would constitute a tool to improve the deplorable living conditions of the late 19^thcentury was considered “a national problem” (Salas, 1914/1967). Thus, the thesis of this analysis is that the school has been an important vector for the deployment of security mechanisms that address issues as diverse as the prevention of diseases, family and student habits, corporal discipline, and moral formation. In other words, the school has been a platform for the governmental construction of a kind of “moral topographies”, in search of “dangerous and endangered populations”, the disciplinary technology of the school being a tactic of moral management (Hunter, 1996, p. 143). 

However, this problem was not exclusive to the Chilean case, and on the contrary, the reception of a series of ideas coming from Europe played a central role. With the sanitary movement that took place in the late 1830s in countries such as England, France and Spain, public health policies took on unprecedented importance, addressing not only technical issues such as sewerage and water infrastructure, but also seeking social stability, moralisation of the working classes, and economic efficiency (Ramos, 2014). In the transition to the 20^th century, this sanitary revolution arrived in Chile, a period in which hygiene, the theory of degeneration and eugenics were theoretical perspectives that constituted the foundations for addressing the so-called “social question”, a historical process that graphs social transformations product of accelerated modernisation, industrialisation and urbanization (Durán, 2014; Vetö, 2014; Becerra, 2018). From this process, hygiene began to be seen as a social and security problem related to issues such as mortality, disease, and contagion, and also, to the prevention of “social diseases”, the propagation of good customs, and the prosperity of the nation. 

From a theoretical perspective, this study is interested in the analysis of how power has been exercised throughout history, process that has been introduced by Foucault (2009b) as “governmentality” in response to what he saw as the insufficiency of theoretical tools to analyse the exercise of power according to modern rationalities in Western societies. Governmentality has been described as a set of institutions, procedures, analyses, reflections, calculations, and tactics that enable the exercise of power, whose main object is the population, its form, the political economy, and its technical instrument, the security dispositif (Castro, 2018). In this framework, the concept of security dispositive is even more important, since according to the analytical proposal presented here, school institutions could be considered as part of their strategic purposes. In this sense, security dispositif is described as the mechanism of government that deals with possible and probable events in the future, assesses the cost through comparative calculations and establishes a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited (Foucault, 2009b) prescribing an optimal mean within a bandwidth of tolerable variation (Gordon, 1991). 

According to the above historical and theoretical background, this research is interested in to analyse the experience of security in the Chilean school in the transition to the 20^th century, which is explored through the articulation of three axes: the axis of truth (knowledge), the axis of power (regulations) and the axis of subjectivity (relationship of the subject with him/herself and with others), whose interconnections is posed as a mechanism and organisational method to account for historical experiences. 

As some authors have diagnosed (Freathy & Parker, 2010), research in education has been dedicated mainly to qualitative and/or quantitative data collection projects, suggesting that a rigorous historical research in education can prevent researchers from adopting ahistorical epistemologies. In this line, this paper seeks to contribute with a Foucauldian-inspired historical analysis on the problem of hygiene, race, and degeneration, and their relation to the Chilean school during the transition to the 20th century, which has implied a documentary research process with a wide range of materials. One important point is to treat the documents in relation to their context (McCulloch, 2014), not only by analysing the discourses found in them, but also their possibilities of existence, who are the subjects of enunciation, and what are the concrete tactics associated with these discourses that lead to their materialisation. For this study it has been useful to distinguish between primary and secondary sources, understanding the former as a direct record of an event, and the latter, formed with the analysis of primary documents. In practical terms, Chile’s primary and secondary documentation is accessible over the Internet through three main platforms: Memoria Chilena is a virtual space that provides access to the historical collections of the country’s main bibliographical centre, finding compilations of documents such as academic papers, legal documentation, news from different times and formats, and history books. Biblioteca Nacional has provided access to historical and current legal documents. Readex has published an extensive collection of primary sources, providing access to the World Newspaper Archive and historical books. Other materials, such as contemporary articles and journals, were tracked through databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Scielo. The above constitutes how the genealogical work has been faced, in which the term archive is relevant, understood not as the documents that a culture preserves as testimony of its past, but as the system of the historical conditions of possibility of statements (Foucault, 2009a). Statements, as events, have a specific regularity that governs their formation and transformations (Castro, 2018). Working with the archive in these terms, does not imply the interpretation of documents in a hermeneutical sense. Instead, it requires the organisation of an archive as a set of elements that need to be described and organised (Foucault, 2009a).

For the exposition for the results, attention is paid to three axes to account for the complex network of interconnections that characterises the transition to the 20th century: the axis of truth, the axis of power, and the axis of subjectivity. In the axis of truth/knowledge the perspectives of hygiene, theories of degeneration and eugenics are delved, as rationalities predominant in the period analysed, which were articulated with regulatory elements that attempted to respond to the problems of the time. These regulatory elements constitute the axis of power or normative axis. In Chile, these norms were translated into policies oriented to the intervention of space, i.e., the cities were intervened, urban planning, and the technical criteria for the construction of schools were defined. In addition, regulatory models were created for the bodies and for the morals of individuals, in which the school played a fundamental role, with an educational system marked by the German model. Finally, the techniques of the self and their articulation with the techniques of domination, which constitute the axis of subjectivation are analysed. Education was contested culturally, politically, and ideologically. Here, the educational projects proposed by the socialist and anarchist avant-garde are reviewed, which sought to take charge of the education of the proletariat, in response to the education offered by the state.

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