Protestant and Catholic Legacies in the Problematization Urban and Rural Education in Mexico and the United States

• In Event: Discourses and Problematization: Considerations of Protest, Healthiness, Whiteness, Propaganda, and Urban-Rural Divides

Proposal

There are few concepts scholars, teachers, and policymakers use more widely to describe, classify, and understand the difference between school experiences than urban and rural education. In Mexico and the US, these concepts stressed the influence of educational environments, arguing that specific special arrangements and geographic location had an enduring effect on the problematic behavior, intellectual deficit, or lack of motivation of rural and urban children. In this paper, I will analyze how the urban and the rural environments were produced through the socio-political ideals of salvation within catholic and protestant traditions and how these ideals became engrained in the languages of education in Mexico and the US (Tröhler, 2011).

These religious traditions created a differentiated landscape of redemptions. On the one hand, within American progressivism in the United States, rurality became related to a sense of community entangled with the colonial settlement, and wilderness and nature became redemptive forces. The settlement economy expanding in the 19th Century and the protestant (particularly congregational, Baptist, and Presbyterian) tendencies to value self-reflection, individuality, and autonomous communities as sources of moral transformation and signs of grace made many American progressives prone to adopt the rural and pastoral space as an antidote to the decadence of the city (Popkewitz, 2010, 2017; Tröhler, 2011, 2021). On the other hand, the educational authorities in Mexico envisioned the city as a force of progress, cosmopolitanism, and culture. The political order of the catholic church made possible this way of seeing salvation coming from a universal source of knowledge and communion, closely tied to catholic colonization and expansion in the 16th Century in the Iberian world. In this sense, rural education was closely tight to the ideal of the missionary, whose purpose was to take the sanctioned doctrine from the centralized church authority emerging from the city (urbe) and adapting to the local conditions in every corner of the globe (orbe).

This paper is a genealogy of the emergence of Urban and Rural education as a matter of concern in educational discourse. A genealogical approach allows us to undercover the performativity in terms that appear neutral but impact the vision and division that we make of the world, carrying normative implications around what is understood as the most natural environment for the development of children. Using tools from history like archives, documents, art, literature, or any of the traces of the past, genealogy is interested in a form of historical analysis that troubles and challenges the concepts educational science uses in the present. Foucault would call this approach a history of the present, contrasting it to traditional history in two fundamental ways (Foucault, 1991, p. 30).

To do this, we will compare how rural and urban educational experts and authorities problematized education by producing knowledge around schooling subjects. The first set of sources appears in the archives of the programs that shaped the notions of rural education in Mexico during the post-revolutionary period: Rural Schools, Rural Teacher Schools, and the "cultural missions" project. I will point out how the concept of Mission is related to a particular understanding of the country as a territory that is to be connected to the universal authority of the church. In this sense, I find the work of Jesuit naturalist and priest Francisco Javier Clavijero a starting point to understand the way Catholicism was understood in the context of the construction of landscape as an active presence within discourses about the civilization, enlightenment, and transformation of peasants and indigenous people in Mexico.

In the context of the United States, I intend to employ similar sources as in the Mexican case, considering the distinctive institutional, political, and administrative features of its public education system. Universities and teachers' schools were critical in standardizing the educational experience. As a result, archives about the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago can offer a starting point for examining the development of foundational educational ideas in the American educational landscape. John Dewey occupies a central position in formulating an American educational philosophy. Nonetheless, due to its location and history, the University of Chicago served as a critical site for forming the American City and its associated "social problems"(Popkewitz, 2010). Therefore, the Department of Sociology at Chicago and scholars such as Robert E. Park, W.I. Thomas, and Albion Small can provide an entry point for investigating this particular urban paradigm.
Finally, a more comprehensive array of sources highlights the formation of national identity in the US, where landscape and nature occupy a central position. One exemplar is the landscape art by painters like Thomas Cole or literature and essays by noteworthy individuals within American Transcendentalism, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. These all provide insight into the educational reality that was profoundly intertwined with the ideals of a national landscape.

The notions of urban and rural schooling emerged alongside the establishment of public and large-scale educational systems in the early 20th Century. This era saw schools become central institutions, with most nation-states mandating and regulating elementary education (Pineau et al., 2001, p. 28). This was a momentous social and pedagogical shift as schooling became nearly ubiquitous and deeply intertwined with ideas about childhood, development, knowledge, and intelligence. Schools became biopolitical instruments through which states sought to shape and reform society by managing cultural experiences in the process of "socialization." In this context, the incorporation of historically marginalized individuals into schooling was facilitated through their construction as problematic students who, with the appropriate set of experiences, could be transformed into redeemable and domesticated subjects. The problem of urban and rural education became part of the frameworks through which the inclusion of these populations was made feasible.

Author

• Marino Miranda Noriega, UW-Madison