Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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of Mexico at the hands of the federal government and the local community alike. Like the Rosenwald schools of the American Deep South and the progressive education movement in the United States, this institutional project was one of the grandest educational chapters in the twentieth-century history of the Western Hemisphere. In every state of the Mexican republic, new rural schools were constructed by the hundreds. Whereas prior to 1910 and the downfall of Porfirio Díaz, schooling had taken place exclusively in the metropolitan centers of the republic, by 1940 nearly every community in the country could claim a rural school of its own. The French state took notice and replicated Mexico’s efforts by 1960.17 Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Bolivia also copied the example. This international example may have reached its apogee in the late 1940s, when UNESCO turned to Mexico’s revolutionary schools as models for development in many parts of the world.
Ultimately, however, it is less important that we come to a universal resolution on the quality of Mexico’s schools than it is to understand why the rural schools became a powerful example off which Americans reflected their spectrum of thought as they wrestled with the place of the public school in the rural American West. First, the relationship between the local community and the national government in Mexico was an example for the Americans of how to rethink the relationship between the state and rural America in the 1930s. Nothing drew their attention more than the willingness of some communities to use their resource bases to construct public schools and provide for the maintenance of the local schoolteachers. Such a funding mechanism for the rural schools was an example, the Americans thought, for the system of schools in the American West, where village schoolhouses still operated without the financial support of state government and outside the supervision of state boards of education. Second, the Americans were interested in the comprehensiveness and uniformity with which pedagogical instruction was carried out away from the metropolitan centers of the nation. The communities that they had come from in the United States were not merely minority communities, but, more important, rural communities whose relationship to the metropole was uncertain and underfinanced. In the context of the small size of the federal state before President Roosevelt and state resources that failed to protect the educational resources of the rural American West, the question of implementing reform was among the most important topics of concern for these Americans. As we shall see, they had committed their careers to the public school as an instrument of ethnic democracy. But such ethical commitments meant almost nothing if institutions could not be produced to carry forth the rejuvenation of industrial society that they imagined. Third, Mexico’s use of the local natural environment as an adjunct space of pedagogy that could be harnessed to the classroom was an important model of instruction. Agriculture, ravines, mountains, flora, animals—all these and more formed a part of the organic environment the Americans surveyed as they journeyed through the provinces of the Mexican countryside. It should be remembered that they had been trained in the pedagogy of pragmatism, and so were constantly on the lookout for methods in learning that they could put into practice in the context of the rural American West.
John Dewey and the Mexican State
Moisés Sáenz had imported pragmatist education to Mexico from Columbia University at the height of John Dewey’s influence in North America. He had studied with Dewey only three years after the publication of Democracy and Education, and he began studying at Columbia the same year, 1919, as the founding of the Progressive Education Association. When he helped to create a province of experimentalist schools for the postrevolutionary state, then, Sáenz transformed the thousands of new schools that began operating in Mexico into a new province of experimentalist education in North America at the very moment new schools inspired by Dewey were simultaneously opening in the United States. Yet timing alone cannot explain the attraction Mexico’s institutions had for the Americans.
The use of Deweyan pragmatism as a system of social transformation in Mexico suffered from important shortcomings, moreover. The expansion of modernist ideas on Mexican soil appears to have been unsystematic, applied across a variety of institutions in various forms rather than on any single level of the federal system, and not limited to any single theory of new education or any single theorist. Pragmatist theory appeared more prominently in the curriculum units of the escuelas normales regionales and the misiones culturales than it did a level below, in the rural elementary schools where the children were attending school. Even in the normal school, however, one is struck by small evidence of direct discussions of pragmatism in comparison to the room given to matters of hygiene, the agricultural economy, and rudimentary pedagogy in mathematics, language instruction, history, and physical science. Similarly, it is difficult to measure systematically the extent to which normal school teachers translated their theoretical training into experiential learning techniques, and to what end. One cannot gauge comprehensively, therefore, whether the outcomes of pragmatism reached Mexico’s schoolchildren, or in what form. Similarly, if one of the ultimate values of Deweyan theory lay in its moral critique of political and economic intransigence in Western society, then we are still left short from understanding without much further work whether children in rural villages like San Miguel Nocutzepo, Michoacán, or Santa Cruz, Hidalgo, were being given the opportunity to think creatively and independently about the relationship of their communities to the new nation that was being reformulated after 1920.
Figure 10. A cultural missionary in the state of Tlaxcala delivering a lesson in educational pedagogy in 1928. John Dewey was received with warm praise and the public honors attending to a foreign diplomat of large stature during a 1926 visit here. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección de Misiones Culturales, Serie Institutos Sociales, Box 20, Folder 3 (Tlaxcala).
Dewey himself had noted the shortcomings of Mexico’s nascent education system. Famously, he had celebrated Mexico’s rural schools in a series of articles for the New Republic after Sáenz had invited him to Mexico City in 1926. Yet in a little-known article in the New York Times on his return to the United States, Dewey revealed his skepticism that Mexico had produced a system of education that reflected the particular needs of Mexico’s peoples. “[T]he Mexican peon, like the Russian mujik, could do with a quarter of a century of intensive drill in reading, writing, spelling, and playing with ideas,” he told the newspaper.18 Although some would indict Dewey as assuming that U.S. democracy was the normative model to which postrevolutionary Mexico should aspire, Dewey’s own view of the importance of diversity to the development of the good community had actually led him to underscore the differences between social organization in the United States and Mexico. Social conditions in Mexico were different, he was arguing, and those particularities deserved deeper considerations from the schools there than they had received. A comment to a group of rural schoolteachers while visiting the normal school of Tlaxcala underscored his skepticism to the New York Times that Mexico had established schools designed for its own needs instead of copying those of other countries. “Dewey wanted the rural schoolteachers to remember the urgency and necessity of avoiding imitation, even if the model originated in the advanced countries, because each nation organizes its own system of education in accordance with its unique history, tradition, racial past, and economic and social institutions,” wrote cultural missionary Primitivo Alvarez during Dewey’s visit to Tlaxcala. “He told us never to look dismally upon the surroundings in which we worked, because once education was reduced to mere imitation, we would lose our unique personality and those things that we could contribute to world civilization.”19 As James Gouinlock has argued, what was noteworthy about Dewey’s observations about Mexico’s schools was Dewey’s “insistence that historical change of all sorts be governed by ideas appropriate to the respective cultures. As in any problematic circumstance, plans should not be imposed a priori and from without.”20
Why, then, did the misión cultural, the escuela normal rural, and casa del pueblo become institutional examples of progressive change for the U.S. social scientists if neither the timing nor pragmatism’s ambivalent career in Mexico suffices to explain the turn? Like Dewey, they noted important shortcomings in Mexico’s schools, including a heavy-handed state bureaucracy that did not always live up to the highest hopes of Deweyan philosophy and