This paper treats Mexican primary school policy between 1890 and 1930 and argues that in this period, school programs were designed primarily to mold a labor force equipped with skills and attitudes appropriate to the modernization process and values and beliefs legitimizing bourgeois rule. Mexico differed from other countries (e.g., the United States and European nations) with similarly defined goals for two principal reasons. On the one hand, a dependent mentality on the part of official educational policy makers expressed in contempt for Mexican culture and a sense of shame vis-a-vis Mexico's lack of development was reflected in a rigidity of program design perhaps greater than that of the metropolitan countries. Secondly, in 1910 Mexico began a revolution in which a petty-bourgeoisie of small businessmen, commercial farmers, lawyers, doctors, and educators challenged the monopoly of economic and political power exercised by the existing elite - large land- and mineowners and some industrialists, most of whom were closely tied to foreign counterparts. Fighting to emerge as an enlarged bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie was confronted with the problem of containing the forces of organized peasants and workers, who fought in the Revolution with goals often at variance with those of the petty bourgeoisie. From 1910 to 1930 schooling was not only viewed as a means of facilitating economic growth, it was moreover an instrument designed to restrain and co-opt the popular forces. In this period, resistance to official school policy took the form of growing support among certain sectors of workers, peasants, and teachers for theories of anarchist pedagogy derivative of the ideas of Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer Guardia. This potential challenge to the more conservative direction being taken by government educational policy makers was diminished in the period under study by the government's success in co-opting groups, by its repression of grass-roots movements, by political divisions within the popular forces, and by general socio-economic conditions in Mexico. However, this challenge to official policy laid the basis for socialist education when workers and peasants forced the Mexican Revolution leftward in the 1930s. Most of the historical studies about Mexican education lionize Justo Sierra, a key figure in the formulation of public school policies in the late nineteenth century who directed the Secretaria de Instruccion Pu'blica y Bellas Artes from 1905 to 1910. Despite the nothing less than heroic stature commonly assigned to Sierra as the proponent of the liberal view of schooling as emancipation in the sense of classical humanism, it becomes clear from a re-examination of the evidence that his more important motives were both consciously and unconsciously directed toward the preparation of a skilled labor force in accordance with the needs of the Mexican bourgeoisie, whose interests Sierra represented. While other attitudes toward primary schooling existed among the elite (some feared that education would increase the revolutionary potential of the poor while others were con