Day 2
Title: John Dewey, Mexican Rural Schools, and the Creation of a Mexican Identity
9:00am-10:20am
Panelists
Ana Cecilia Galindo Diego, Mónica del Carmen Meza Mejía
Discussant
Virginia Aspe
Panel Description
In this session, we will be drawing largely on work by Dussel, Migniolo, and Rivera Cusicanqui in order to analyze the creation of the Mexican rural schools from the beginning of the last century. This endeavor was ostensibly rooted in the Deweyan tradition, but as we will discuss it became an (inadvertent) mechanism for inducting the entire indigenous population into the progressivist-productive paradigm of modernization, forsaking the traditions, beliefs and ways of life of these peoples’ epistemological traditions. We will argue that the creation and implementation of the schools may look Deweyan and progressive, but, because the model is not rooted in the community itself, it in fact goes against the character of what Dewey proposed in his writings. To elucidate this point, we will utilize Dewey’s Democracy and Education as well as his short piece on his travels to visit the rural schools entitled “Mexico, 1926” in John Dewey’s Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World-Mexico-China-Turkey 1929, published out of Teachers College.
Title: John Dewey, Mexican Rural Schools, and the Creation of a Mexican Identity
9:00am-10:20am
Panelists
Ana Cecilia Galindo Diego, Mónica del Carmen Meza Mejía
Discussant
Virginia Aspe
Panel Description
In this session, we will be drawing largely on work by Dussel, Migniolo, and Rivera Cusicanqui in order to analyze the creation of the Mexican rural schools from the beginning of the last century. This endeavor was ostensibly rooted in the Deweyan tradition, but as we will discuss it became an (inadvertent) mechanism for inducting the entire indigenous population into the progressivist-productive paradigm of modernization, forsaking the traditions, beliefs and ways of life of these peoples’ epistemological traditions. We will argue that the creation and implementation of the schools may look Deweyan and progressive, but, because the model is not rooted in the community itself, it in fact goes against the character of what Dewey proposed in his writings. To elucidate this point, we will utilize Dewey’s Democracy and Education as well as his short piece on his travels to visit the rural schools entitled “Mexico, 1926” in John Dewey’s Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World-Mexico-China-Turkey 1929, published out of Teachers College.