Primary Schooling in the City of Puebla, 1821-60
HE mystique of the Mexican Revolution's educational crusade in the 1920S long overshadowed our understanding of its prerevolutionary antecedents. In fact, Jose Vasconcelos's literacy campaign of 1921 expanded on a school systemi built in the Reforma and Porfiriato under the ideological guidance of the central government and the bureaucratic administration of state governments. New research has taken us back into the Bourbon reform period of the late eighteenth century when political officials and intellectuals began to promote mass primary schooling in consonance with Enlightenment notions of utility and productivity. After independence, their concern was carried forward by liberal and conservative leaders who saw the urgency of creating a national school system as a means of forging an independent and prosperous nation. However, the weakness of the central government in the postindependence period meant that many of these blueprints were ineffective outside the capital. In the country as a whole, initiatives more often rested with traditional institutions such as the church, the town councils, and remnants of the officially defunct teachers' guilds; with new private organizations like the Lancaster Company; and with the many individuals who entered the teaching profession after the demise of guild restrictions. Provincial-level or state governments both fostered and constrained these initiatives, which in the end suffered from the prolonged crisis of political instability, economic depression, foreign invasion, and civil war.'