Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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life in rural Mexico was a decayed civilization where new light had to be introduced as part of the postrevolutionary moral order.30 The rural normal school newspapers sometimes argued that the new Mexican school should become an arbiter of power no matter what the local community desired. These examples clearly confirm what scholars like Mary Kay Vaughan, Susana Quintanilla, and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez have argued about postrevolutionary Mexico: through such instruments as El Maestro Rural, the state represented a heavy hand of authority that constrained the possibilities for rural people into prescribed channels rather than increasing the chances for lives free of authoritarian control.31
Yet as historian of Mexico Alexander Dawson has pointed out, emphasizing paternalistic control without underscoring the simultaneous presence of ideas that can be interpreted as challenges to authority structures is a good story that “relies on a vision of the past that distorts as much as it reveals.”32 Félix Gómez emphasized free choice in his essay, for example. Salvador León y Ortiz was clear that the SEP’s new education models emphasized interest in the task at hand rather than obligation as the source of work. And even as Chávez romanticized the career of a sixteenth-century priest whose politics was not neutral, she underscored the critique of the conventional view of the Indian that John Dewey and Franz Boas had helped to make central to twentieth-century social theory. The Indian was rational in the context of his own culture, and fitted to ideas just like anyone else, she wrote.33 Quiroga was a model not merely because he emphasized the expansion of freedom in the realm of civic intercourse, but because he emphasized political freedom as part of the hierarchy of power. One eminent historian of postrevolutionary education in Mexico, Elsie Rockwell, has put the spread of modernist ideas in the following way. “The SEP’s bulletins and journals carried the new educational philosophy into the states of the nation. The echo of those ideas is to be found in the texts and the discussions in the schools of Tlaxcala. Those ideas did not enter without much subsequent commentary, but at the very least, the educators of the SEP created new spaces in which these debates could take place.”34 These examples do not suggest Mexico had been transformed into a democratic nation. They support the more modest claim that new philosophical ideas were entering the provinces of the Mexican state through the influence of John Dewey and others, where they were recognized by the Americans who visited Mexico in the 1930s. The Americans who came to Mexico later were astonished to find such ideas at work there, because they were struggling to bring those same ideas to bear on the difficult social conditions of the rural American West where they worked.
Mexico’s schools also represented important experimental models of administrative practice for the Americans. Such concerns may seem quotidian, but the flow of resources from Mexico City to the rural normal schools required methodical planning, good communication between SEP headquarters and rural schools in the provinces, and a system for supervising the mandates directed by the state. Cultural missionaries had to find ways to organize rural students into discrete grades and classrooms, integrate teaching methodologies into the daily rituals of rural villagers, and convince supportive villages that new methods of instruction would prove beneficial to the economic and political inclinations of local families. None of these measures could be taken for granted, the Americans knew. Faced with metropolitan political bureaucracies at home that had little experience in managing new educational techniques in rural communities, the Americans were amazed by the extent to which Mexico’s central state had unfolded its educational projects in the provinces of the postrevolutionary republic. The expenditure of resources was deeply inadequate by Mexico’s own standard, covering only a fraction of the national territory. But to the Americans, those resources represented a formidable administrative project in the rural scene whose components could be profitably modified for use in the American West.
Third, Dewey in Mexico had currency for the Americans because he had succeeded in moving the understanding of the school in the direction of the study of psychology. Contextualizing Dewey within psychology is not an easy move to make in twentieth-century Mexican history, since debates about psychology and the school are not antiseptic discussions to be considered outside the deep political stakes involved in the decades following the Mexican Revolution. Yet any review of Dewey’s role in educational reform, political transformation, aesthetics, and ethics is not merely incomplete, but fundamentally flawed, if it does not first take into account his interest in how the mind creates knowledge out of experience in order to transform how knowledge is used politically. Psychology was central to Dewey’s transformational project, but it was not its handmaiden, as it is typically treated in the historiography of the Mexican Revolution.35
Mexico’s emphasis on psychology in education sensitized the Americans to rural education in Mexico as a system that was attempting to make the apprehension of meaning more transparent and tangible. In this regard, nothing was more important than the process that in Mexican historiography has come to be called “action-centered education.” In the tradition of Mexican historiography, the rituals of practice in Mexico’s rural schools have been widely condemned for their presumptions and attempts at labor control. Teaching such manual skills as gardening, sewing, furniture design, and basket making has been rightly critiqued as a means of emphasizing specific labor practices in the interest of promoting a particular form of economic production in postrevolutionary Mexico. Yet for the Americans, manual practice was more than mere production for the economy. It was, instead, the measure of an idea. It was what distinguished one thought from another, the link between an impression residing in the mind and a specific object, process, or relationship in the world that surrounded the human being. As Greg Grandin has recently pointed out in the case of Brazil, it is right to see experience in the progressive educational universe as amenable to labor control and the dictates of the teacher.36 But such a view does not exhaust what practice represented. If viewed though the language of psychology that was under development during the first half of the twentieth century, it also represented a way to comprehend how human beings made associations between thought and world. As such, practice was an inescapable component of knowing, a process that needed to be studied and refined in all the circumstances in which it took place. Such experiential practice was fundamental to Deweyan thought. For making associations in the world was a fundamental step in transforming the physical and social conditions in which human communities were enmeshed.37
Psychologist Loyd Tireman was the consummate example of the window into practice and action that rural education in Mexico represented when the Americans arrived to study state policy there. He had long been interested in the psychology of language as a process of thinking. In the laboratory schools of the American Midwest and American West where he had trained, the concern with drawing associations between word and object was the fundamental concern of a forty-year career in education. When he arrived in Mexico in 1931, he was quickly drawn to the use of guitars as instruments of practice in the rural schools of Hidalgo, as well as plays and skits as instruments for teaching history and cultural tradition. Such practices, he knew, had long been a staple of Deweyan laboratory schools across the American landscape, as John and Evelyn Dewey’s 1915 Schools of Tomorrow attested.38 Yet such techniques for understanding how the mind apprehends data routinely came up against a problem in psychology that remains a large stumbling block in social science work into the twenty-first century: how were educators and psychologists to design systems of learning for children whose native language was not English? In the context of New Mexico where Tireman worked, the dominant language was Spanish, a language for which he found a ready analog in postrevolutionary Mexico. Not labor control, but the fit between ideas in Spanish and practice in Mexico and New Mexico became the object of his search within the institutions of the Mexican state in the 1930s. Such minute observations by Tireman may seem otherworldly for scholars searching to tell the political history of twentieth-century Mexico. Yet the fact that such minuscule work was central to the Americans only underscores how important it is to interpret Deweyan pragmatism as something other than a defense of Fordist political economy.
The set of policy experiments that postrevolutionary Mexico represented made its cultural missions, rural normal academies, and rural schools institutions the Americans could profitably study as potential new instruments for social reconstruction in the United States. As practitioners of modernist ideas who had studied the thickness of Dewey’s wide-ranging thought, the Americans searched for clues about Dewey in Mexico that were broader than