As the title indicates, this is an examination of official educational tendencies in public primary, secondary, and normal schools from 1821 to 1911 with special attention to the period of the Restored Republic and the Porfiriato. It forms part of a larger project of the Seminar on the Philosophy of Education in Mexico planned to continue the line of investigation up to the middle of the twentieth century. The investigation is limited geographically to the Federal District and the Federal Territories with some consideration of practices in rural areas and the provinces and with reference to the ideas, theories, and educational methods applied in Europe and North America. Meneses Morales is an educator seeking to identify the official educational tendencies and determine if any constitutes a true philosophy of education. In largely chronological order, he examines the process by which Mexico’s education came to be progressively “free, gratis, uniform, obligatory, secular, complete, and national” (pp. 650-652).
This is an excellent example of traditional scholarship with its exhaustive examination of a single subject. Research is based on examination of curricula and educational plans from independence to the revolution making appropriate use of official memorias, documents, plans, projects, proposed educational bills, and laws, together with their regulations, instructions, and modifications (both manuscript and published), along with nonofficial projects, textbooks, press reports, and articles, as well as historical and contemporary secondary studies. The resulting volume is well written, clear, and, at times, even lyrical. Forthright and direct organization clearly shows what questions are addressed and what subjects have been left out.
Although principally dedicated to an abstract or philosophical treatment, the author nevertheless ineludes considerations of historical, ethnic, and sociopolitical context. Teachers, for example, were recruited primarily from among the small middle class, and they lacked both prestige and pay. During the Porfiriato, salaries for teachers were only about half the wages earned by factory laborers. Although Iorfirio Díaz presided over the creation of a separate ministry for education and dedicated larger proportions of the national budget to education, “the same governmental system impeded [social improvement through education for the poor] because cheap labor was required for industrialization” (p. 655).
The length of this volume makes it likely that only those most dedicated to the study of the philosophy of education will read every page, but the rewards of doing so include fascinating details of nineteenth-century educational programs. The planned curriculum for secondary schools in 1833, for example, required the study of Otomí and Tarascan, as well as English, French, German, Latin, and Greek, and it specified “idioma nacional” to replace “gramática castellana” (pp. 102-103). The frequent changes of official curricula in the first half-century of independence provide graphic illustration of the official instability of those years; of the 16 subjects required in 1833, only 2 (French and mathematics) coincided with the curriculum of a decade earlier. Although it does not exhaust the theme of education in nineteenth-century Mexico, this work represents a substantial achievement.
