L'image de l'espace scolaire dans les livres de lecture de l'école primaire, Buenos Aires 1853‐1942*

Abstract

This paper seeks to throw new light on an important source for the History of Education, the Reading school book. Within a larger research project we are carrying out on formation of primary schools in the city of Buenos Aires, the Reading book has surfaced as a key documentary source. Our point is that the Argentine Nation State needed an architectonic dimension in configuring its primary school, a dimension that used readings and images that were distinct from material resources that traditionally signified national importance. In brief, Argentina had to turn the primary school into a place easily recognizable for what happens inside ‐ teaching and learning ‐ and for what that teaching and learning stood for. the Nation‐State in its capital city. Reading books took on an important role in this nation buildingprocess, through both iconographie and textual materials that conveyed various ways of imagining school space, especially a poetic sense of space which signified multiple modes of representation and assertion. The most interesting aspect in the paper is its use of the spatial viewpoint, along side of the material aspect of school buildings. The words and images printed in Reading books, their variance and dominance, go beyond the material and evoke the sense and meaning of space in a broader sociohistorical framework. * Traduction française de Lucia Inés Dorín et Maria Sol Dorin. Pour cet article le prix ISCHE‐2000 a été décerné à l'auteur.