The pedagogy of latrines. A kaleidoscopic look at the history of school bathrooms in Argentina, 1880-1930

Abstract

ABSTRACT School bathrooms are liminal spaces where notions about intimacy and one’s public persona are configured and where issues such as sex and gender are centrally experienced and proved. These learnings are partially scripted by architectural design and pedagogical rules but not fully captured by them. In this article, I intend to historicise these configurations through an analysis of the trajectories of school bathrooms in Argentina from 1880 to 1930. Grounding on sensorial and material histories of schooling and on architectural and cultural histories, I follow the thread of toilets through school plans, state regulations, photographs, architectural treatises and pedagogical reports. I claim that issues such as the height of doors, the quality of floor and wall materials, the preference for squat or flush-down toilets, or the presence or absence of windows and mirrors, became contested arenas and that they can be projected as fragments of a kaleidoscope, as proposed by Sigfried Giedion, and not as a unified narrative of progress. I conclude that educational research would benefit from paying attention to apparently insignificant elements whose refraction visibilises not the history of purity and civilisation but that of impure hybrids that contained different possibilities.