Constructing Difference in Puerto Rican Education at the Turn of the 20th Century

• In Event: 75.016 - Historicizing the Present: Logics of Knowledge and Constructions of School Subjects in the Modern Era

Abstract

Studies on difference are critical for understanding how the human sciences are situated within the epistemological field of modern knowledge. In my paper, the notion of difference is problematized philosophically, culturally, and historically by focusing on concepts of truth, identity, and knowledge as effects of difference. In addition, my paper examines how such effects of difference work to construct governmental rationalities, or governmentalities. Understanding the processes for rationalizing knowledge and constructing the subject as a cultural being and as a historical “fact” can provide leverage for problematizing particular discourses and acts of government and governing.

The history and historiography of Puerto Rican education has been constructed to talk about difference by placing the subject as the origin of interpretation where the a priori subject becomes the locus of power and change. Previous studies of Puerto Rican education have also focused their epistemological foundations of knowledge construction as theories of causation. These ontological commitments to thinking and analysis both create and rely on conceptual and historical ‘essences’ and ‘truths’ about the subject as an agent of change and an object of representation. It will be argued that the conceptual and historical limit of these studies is their emphasis on the subject as the origin of interpretation. The objective of my paper is to examine the social constructions of knowledge and reason that “make” the objects of schooling (Popkewitz, 1998; 2008). In doing so, the systems of reason and the construction of knowledge in Puerto Rican schooling are analyzed, which is a departure from previous studies on Puerto Rican education.

This paper uses the history of the present as a method for making the knowledge of education a problematic, and questioning the epistemological and ontological boundaries that define knowledge. Specifically, this paper analyzes the scientific construction of knowledge in Puerto Rican education during the turn of the twentieth century, and how the scientific reasoning of the jíbaro is a social production that becomes part of the cultural theses about Puerto Rican schooling and society. By analyzing the scientific reasoning of the jíbaro as a social production and cultural thesis, an examination can be made of how the object of Puerto Rican schooling is conceptualized, becomes an object of research, and the target of reform. These political, social and epistemological relationships that make the construction of particular ideas possible are part of a social epistemology of Puerto Rican schooling. Furthermore, by questioning the conditions that make them possible allows for research on how the human sciences are situated within the epistemological field of modern knowledge. Such an approach helps to understand how a system of thought is used to culturally construct the notion of difference in contemporary Puerto Rican education. This cultural, historical, and philosophical approach is used to study the constructions of difference, and provide an interpretive way to think about the modern social sciences and eugenics in Puerto Rican education studies. As such, this paper is both about pedagogy and the science of pedagogy.

Author

• Bethsaida Nieves, University of Wisconsin - Madison