Popular education and the logics of schooling

Abstract

In this article, I compare two distinct uses of “Popular Education” that emerged in Tlaxcala in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. I examine archival and oral evidence to reconstruct the situated meanings and political rationales that led to the use of the term in each case, beyond their contrasting pedagogical content. In 1917, a revolutionary faction promoted “popular education” by providing elementary schools throughout regions under its control, in order to secure legitimacy as a transitional government. In the late 1930s, the post‐revolutionary federal state launched a campaign of “popular education” ostensibly to promote adult literacy, which served to control radical teachers and consolidate a popular front in support of the incoming conservative presidential candidate. Simultaneously, the traditional rural pueblos negotiated and appropriated schooling and literacy for their own ends, in ways that at times went counter to those deployed by governing authorities. Noting the ambiguities of the terms pueblo and pueblos in Mexican history, I reconstruct both the logic of schooling for the people and the logic of schooling of the people. These particular histories point to the multiple rationales sustaining popular education projects, linked to the political and social movements that produced or resisted their actual implementation.