The socialisation of educational problems and the rise of illiteracy in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century
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[1] University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
City of Madison, Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Paedagogica Historica: International journal of the history of education, ISSN 0030-9230, Vol. 59, Nº. 1, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Rethinking the social in the history of education), págs. 55-69
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
In the past two decades, the interdisciplinary push to denaturalise the concept of society has historicised the very object of social history. In this paper, I propose a way of studying the social history of education that eludes the presupposition of the social as a transcendental or pre-discursive object. My central claim is that it is possible to observe a process of socialisation regarding educational problems. This means that the social and society were not simply concepts that created a new object of knowledge, but rather that they became a visualisation principle that allowed for the abstraction of categories and made observable a set of relationships. These notions are contained and articulated in how social problems were produced, observed, performed, and acted upon by educational and political actors. I will do this by examining the production of illiteracy (analfabetismo in Spanish) as a social problem in Mexico in the first decades of the twentieth century. I argue that two fundamental processes rendered illiteracy a social problem. First, the development of statistical knowledge and methods made it possible to know the number of people who did not read and write, creating the illiterate as a statistical category. The second is the articulation of this statistical reality as a generalised problem by education experts and authorities. In this sense, literacy was abstracted and framed as an essential feature for the proper functioning of a modern society.
