Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores

but they were not intellectuals blind to the weaknesses of Mexican reform. They may have been optimistic, but they were not naive social scientists who saw redemptionist possibilities for the postrevolutionary educational system where there were none.²¹

      For the Americans, Mexico’s educational institutions were a realm of contingent possibilities rather than a model example of politics that had been successfully achieved. First, the evidence of pragmatist theory at the level of the rural normal school—however attenuated it may have been—represented an experiment in potential transformation via the school they tested for use in the United States. Second, Mexico provided a source of experimental ideas about educational administration in the rural scene. Third, because they placed experience and practice alongside theory, Mexico’s schools provided the Americans with useful evidence for the questions of psychology that Dewey asked in the wake of the educational revolution that he helped to usher in. Taken collectively, these broader interpretations of Dewey provided three strong reasons the Americans found institutional experimentation in Mexico constructive for their discrete projects at home rather than a superficial confirmation of the spontaneous emergence of ethnic democracy in postrevolutionary society.²²

      Documentary evidence from the rural normal schools, for example, shows that some of the essential characteristics that defined pragmatist theory were being used in rural Mexico. In a series of handwritten exams completed by schoolteachers-in-training in the state of Michoacán, for example, young men and women in residence at the escuelas normales left evidence that what they were being taught was something more than top-down management techniques designed to create a tractable labor force. Félix Gómez was one case in point. “The child has a divine right to a life of enjoyment, to an abundance of room carved out for play, to shape his labors at school in a manner that conforms to the distinct stages of his life and to express his efforts through activities of immediate interest,” he wrote in his final exam. “It is the case, then, that to impose on the child is to stifle his spontaneity; it is fatal to his free choice; that work subverts play and the execution of labor to his own proper initiative.” He continued: “Under the inspiration of a good schoolteacher and with a developed sense of initiative, the innate interests of the child are sufficient for him to carry out his daily labors.” There are many questions raised by this small passage buried in the final exam of a young schoolteacher in training as it was recorded in the educational records of a nascent normal school in the mountains of central Michoacán state. What was the precise source of these ideas? To what extent were these ideas practiced at the annex school among four-and five-year-old children rather than merely left at the level of theoretical instruction in the normal school? Were Gómez’s ideas edited by his normal school professors? We may never know the answers to these questions. But the very presence of these ideas in modern education, written just three months after John Dewey’s 1926 study trip to Mexico, opens up the possibility that some of the tenets of pragmatist thought were infiltrating the minds of the young schoolteachers of the nation.²³

      Félix Gómez was not alone. Another handwritten document by a young schoolteacher from the rural normal school at Tacámbaro, Michoacán, supports the role of the pragmatist critique of formalistic education in the educational institutions of Mexico’s still evolving nation: In the old school “it was simply understood that the students would work, like the teeth of the wheel of a grand machine without enjoying any of the benefits of their excessive labors, by force of the teacher who would give loud orders or harsh punishments.… But today this method no longer exists in the schools. It is not the teacher who obligates one to work, but love itself, or interest in the thing that the student is dedicated to learning.” Like a divine wind, the student wrote, a new school had been created. “The day came when the winds of progress came and broke apart the walls of the old school, leaving it clear to everyone in general, that, like the dictum that is repeated in the Decalogue of El Maestro Rural, ‘My school in the true house of the people.’ ”²⁴ In a different example, schoolteacher-in-training María Chávez exhibited the new philosophical principles as they had been introduced in rural Mexico in a celebration of the career of the sixteenth-century Catholic bishop Vasco de Quiroga. Among the episodes in Mexican history that the Americans celebrated when they began arriving in Mexico in the early 1930s were the open-air academies of Vasco de Quiroga, whose sixteenth-century policies in education and self-government among the Tarascan Indians of Michoacán continue to be honored by some in Michoacán today. Often counterposed to the scorched-earth policies of Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, Quiroga’s policies of vernacular-language instruction and autonomy in learning practices were used by the Americans as a precursor to twentieth-century postrevolutionary government policy. Chávez agreed, as her 1926 final exam at the Tacámbaro rural normal school reflected: “The theme that was recommended to me has convinced me of the large similarity that exists between the pedagogy imparted by a group of benefactors after the conquest and the present-day rural schools,” she wrote. “Don Vasco de Quiroga … said that the Indian is a rational human being and a younger brother who waits for an education and who is worthy of it like anyone else.… Quiroga formed the rural schools whose trajectory to better the conditions of the Indians was very great. That tendency cannot be reduced to the social life of the Indians, but to Quiroga’s move to release them from the slavery in which they found themselves.”²⁵

      The monthly newspapers published by the rural normal schools displayed testimonials to potential social change, meanwhile. In Erongarícuaro, Michoacán, for example, a young fourth-grade student named Jesús published a short editorial consisting of the ten maxims that expressed the social ethics he was developing at the rural normal school there. “Our country cries for citizens who fight to be free. It is good to be independent,” he wrote. In a space left blank, he invited his readers to express their hopes for self-fulfillment as the administrators of the SEP in Mexico City attempted to build a national system of schools. “If you would create a brilliant career, fulfill your responsibility as student and you shall end by becoming a (fill-in-the-blank-as-you-choose).” In a third comment, Jesús directly targeted the Indians of Michoacán: “You [the Indian] have fought to liberate your race and died [for that cause] so that others later could defend their rights, thereby becoming free like the lion of the mountain and free like the birds of the skies.”²⁶ A second example comes from the monthly newspaper of the rural normal school at Xocoyucan, Tlaxcala. In December 1926, the young student identified only as “A.G.A.” described the importance of paying attention to the interests of the child as the central consideration of the schoolteacher under whose supervision she would fall. “To study the talents of a child is fundamental and requires continuous and close observation of his spontaneous activities. One must watch the child at play and during her assigned tasks, where one can measure the satisfaction that occurs when she experiments with a difficult labor,” he wrote. Such work, wrote the student, was a labor of many years, since oftentimes one’s interests did not emerge until age twelve or fourteen. Yet such difficult labor was necessary because the world needed people of all types. “We take great notice of our mission, which is steadfastly opposed to transform our classrooms into warehouses for our students. Many students who were called good-for-nothings, stubborn, dense, dumb, or crazy were simply misunderstood; we tried to force square pegs into round holes.” Earlier in his essay, he had elaborated on just this very point. “It is well known that there are no two individuals who are exactly alike. That is why we say that nature breaks the mold each time that a new child is born.”²⁷

      These postrevolutionary challenges to traditional power structures do not invalidate contemporary historical criticism that Mexico’s postrevolutionary educational projects were efforts at social control. In Chávez’s own words is the evidence that the state could be a paternalistic influence on rural Mexico via education policies that rationalized the Indian as a member of the human race in the attempt merely to subvert his freedom anew. Chávez states that it was her schoolteacher who had recommended the topic of Vasco de Quiroga to her, for example. Quiroga was a Catholic priest who, as Chávez writes, was attempting to convert Mexico’s Native Americans to the Catholic faith rather than trying to increase their level of freedom to some precursor condition that antedated the Spanish conquest.²⁸ Similar clues of control are found throughout the essays in the files of Tacámbaro, Michoacán. In the words of Agripina Magaña J., for example, the Indian was alcoholic, dirty, and lazy.²⁹