Counterrevolutionary Consultations: The Politics of Private Education in Cold War Mexico

• In Event: Cold Warriors and Technocrats: Experts and Expertise in the Latin American City

Abstract

This paper examines the social, political, and cultural roots and impacts of the private educational sector during Mexico's Cold War era of economic expansion. Concerned with dismantling the trappings of the Porfirian oligarchy, postrevolutionary reformers rallied around a new constitutional guarantee of free, obligatory, and lay education. Integral for establishing a national and liberal educational plan was a reorientation in focus for the schooling of the poor and the indigenous, as well as a prohibition of private religious institutions. Private secular schools, especially institutions catering to expatriates, filled the void left by their religious counterparts and steadily proliferated to take advantage of the dissatisfaction of emerging middle and elite classes with underfunded and substandard urban public education. By the dawn of the Cold War, an incipient boom in private schools engendered serious debates between the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and its critics about the private educational sector’s threat to national culture, the emergence of private instruction as a consumer good, and the comparative performance of Mexican education on the world stage. Crucial to these conversations were the input of foreign educational consultants whose analysis of the state's shortcomings foreshadowed the neoliberal turn and dramatic growth of private enterprise during the late Cold War period. The increasing reliance of both the PRI and its detractors, including private school lobby groups, on international consultants represents a transnational nexus that has yet to be contextualized historically and will provide critical insights on the PRI's current educational crisis.

Author

• Taylor H Jardno, Yale University