Historia de la educación durante el porfiriato Open Access

The last few years have seen a growing interest in the Porfirian period among historians of Mexico. Once neglected, the Porfiriato has become a fashionable dissertation subject and an unavoidable parallel for Mexico’s current political life. Although the massive work edited by Daniel Cosío Villegas endures as the major study of this period, new studies are currently reshaping our ideas of the Porfiriato. The work under review is but one of a number of studies published in the last five years, three of which deserve mention: Ann Staples, El dominio de las minorías (1989), a collection of conference papers treating the república restaurada and the Porfirian era through the history of elites; Fernando Escalante, Ciudadanos imaginarios (1992), an insightful and theoretically challenging (albeit uneven and historiographically skimpy) approach to morality and public opinion in nineteenth-century Mexico; and Carlos Tello Díaz, El exilio (1993), the heretofore untold story of the Porfirian elite after the Ipiranga, a profuse (exaggeratedly so), intelligent, well-documented, revealing, and nostalgic proof that los ricos también lloran.

Mílada Bazant’s Historia de la educación durante el Porfiriato adds greatly to our understanding of the institutional, legal, regional, social, gender, and professional aspects of education during this era. It nicely combines national and regional trends in an attempt to document what seems an all-too-obvious conclusion: education during the Porfirian period was regionally and gender unequal, and by and large it failed to achieve the goal of popular alphabetization, favoring the emergence of an elite ilustrada regardless of the existence of a mayoría iletrada.

However apparent this conclusion might seem, Bazant proves that in seeking to achieve a popular education the Porfirian elite had to redefine and readapt its ideological goals to its interests as well as to the intricate social and geographical shape of the country. This ambivalence did not hinder technical and scientific excellence in the elite’s educational realm. But Bazant’s book unevenly handles the issues it advances. Moreover, this book on education ironically makes its reader succumb to an excessively pedagogical style.

Out of nine chapters, the first three deal with the fundamental goals of Porfirian education and its institutional framework, especially primary education and alphabetization. Although these chapters introduce important information, the argument and data could have been summarized in a single chapter. In contrast, the topics of the last three chapters (scientific education, the role of Jesuits in Porfirian education, and the creation of an elite of professionals) deserve more extensive analysis.

Nevertheless, chapter 4 is a well-documented and straightforward statistical inquiry into Porfirian education’s real social achievements (supported by González Navarro’s 1956 statistical synthesis of the Porfiriato). Chapter 5 describes the Porfirian emphasis on technical and arts-and-crafts education. Chapter 6 deals with the training of teachers and their growing role in fostering upward social mobility.

The reader can find material for ruminating on three matters. First, women’s unequal education vis-à-vis men, and the important role educated women played in such tasks as teaching, services, and industry. Second, the relationship between modern nationalism and education, which is actually more inherent than the author wants us to believe. Here one wonders whether religious institutions played a different role (vis-à-vis lay schools) in the creation of a nationalistic consciousness. In dealing with this issue Bazant herself is sometimes betrayed by her desire to denounce the undemocratic nature of the Porfirian regime. For instance, Bazant claims that the unification of such subjects as civismo and geography in the schools’ curricula meant the misplaying of the latter:

A late nineteenth-century nationalistic ideology could hardly be conceived without the inseparable link of the nation’s space (geography) and time (history, civic religion). That is, in teaching the national consciousness, the lessons of García Cuba or, for that matter, José María Velazco were inseparable from those of Justo Sierra or Teja Zabre.

Finally, Historia de la educación highlights the importance of a comprehensive history of the professions in Mexico. Bazant introduces valuable data on such distinguished professions as the law, medicine, dentistry, accounting, architecture, and engineering. The last she further elaborates in her essay in La educación en la historia de México, ed. Josefina Z. Vázquez (1992). One would only expect more elaboration on the wider cultural characteristics of an environment that fostered excellence in medicine and engineering while it also provoked fears of the growth of the falange negra del proletariado intelectual.