learning techniques, and to what end. One cannot gauge comprehensively, therefore, whether the outcomes of pragmatism reached Mexico’s schoolchildren, or in what form. Similarly, if one of the ultimate values of Deweyan theory lay in its moral critique of political and economic intransigence in Western society, then we are still left short from understanding without much further work whether children in rural villages like San Miguel Nocutzepo, Michoacán, or Santa Cruz, Hidalgo, were being given the opportunity to think creatively and independently about the relationship of their communities to the new nation that was being reformulated after 1920.
Figure 10. A cultural missionary in the state of Tlaxcala delivering a lesson in educational pedagogy in 1928. John Dewey was received with warm praise and the public honors attending to a foreign diplomat of large stature during a 1926 visit here. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección de Misiones Culturales, Serie Institutos Sociales, Box 20, Folder 3 (Tlaxcala).
Dewey himself had noted the shortcomings of Mexico’s nascent education system. Famously, he had celebrated Mexico’s rural schools in a series of articles for the New Republic after Sáenz had invited him to Mexico City in 1926. Yet in a little-known article in the New York Times on his return to the United States, Dewey revealed his skepticism that Mexico had produced a system of education that reflected the particular needs of Mexico’s peoples. “[T]he Mexican peon, like the Russian mujik, could do with a quarter of a century of intensive drill in reading, writing, spelling, and playing with ideas,” he told the newspaper.18 Although some would indict Dewey as assuming that U.S. democracy was the normative model to which postrevolutionary Mexico should aspire, Dewey’s own view of the importance of diversity to the development of the good community had actually led him to underscore the differences between social organization in the United States and Mexico. Social conditions in Mexico were different, he was arguing, and those particularities deserved deeper considerations from the schools there than they had received. A comment to a group of rural schoolteachers while visiting the normal school of Tlaxcala underscored his skepticism to the New York Times that Mexico had established schools designed for its own needs instead of copying those of other countries. “Dewey wanted the rural schoolteachers to remember the urgency and necessity of avoiding imitation, even if the model originated in the advanced countries, because each nation organizes its own system of education in accordance with its unique history, tradition, racial past, and economic and social institutions,” wrote cultural missionary Primitivo Alvarez during Dewey’s visit to Tlaxcala. “He told us never to look dismally upon the surroundings in which we worked, because once education was reduced to mere imitation, we would lose our unique personality and those things that we could contribute to world civilization.”19 As James Gouinlock has argued, what was noteworthy about Dewey’s observations about Mexico’s schools was Dewey’s “insistence that historical change of all sorts be governed by ideas appropriate to the respective cultures. As in any problematic circumstance, plans should not be imposed a priori and from without.”20
Why, then, did the misión cultural, the escuela normal rural, and casa del pueblo become institutional examples of progressive change for the U.S. social scientists if neither the timing nor pragmatism’s ambivalent career in Mexico suffices to explain the turn? Like Dewey, they noted important shortcomings in Mexico’s schools, including a heavy-handed state bureaucracy that did not always live up to the highest hopes of Deweyan philosophy and the unevenness of educational reform policies across the expanse of the nation. These Americans may have been foreign observers, but they were not intellectuals blind to the weaknesses of Mexican reform. They may have been optimistic, but they were not naive social scientists who saw redemptionist possibilities for the postrevolutionary educational system where there were none.21
For the Americans, Mexico’s educational institutions were a realm of contingent possibilities rather than a model example of politics that had been successfully achieved. First, the evidence of pragmatist theory at the level of the rural normal school—however attenuated it may have been—represented an experiment in potential transformation via the school they tested for use in the United States. Second, Mexico provided a source of experimental ideas about educational administration in the rural scene. Third, because they placed experience and practice alongside theory, Mexico’s schools provided the Americans with useful evidence for the questions of psychology that Dewey asked in the wake of the educational revolution that he helped to usher in. Taken collectively, these broader interpretations of Dewey provided three strong reasons the Americans found institutional experimentation in Mexico constructive for their discrete projects at home rather than a superficial confirmation of the spontaneous emergence of ethnic democracy in postrevolutionary society.22
Documentary evidence from the rural normal schools, for example, shows that some of the essential characteristics that defined pragmatist theory were being used in rural Mexico. In a series of handwritten exams completed by schoolteachers-in-training in the state of Michoacán, for example, young men and women in residence at the escuelas normales left evidence that what they were being taught was something more than top-down management techniques designed to create a tractable labor force. Félix Gómez was one case in point. “The child has a divine right to a life of enjoyment, to an abundance of room carved out for play, to shape his labors at school in a manner that conforms to the distinct stages of his life and to express his efforts through activities of immediate interest,” he wrote in his final exam. “It is the case, then, that to impose on the child is to stifle his spontaneity; it is fatal to his free choice; that work subverts play and the execution of labor to his own proper initiative.” He continued: “Under the inspiration of a good schoolteacher and with a developed sense of initiative, the innate interests of the child are sufficient for him to carry out his daily labors.” There are many questions raised by this small passage buried in the final exam of a young schoolteacher in training as it was recorded in the educational records of a nascent normal school in the mountains of central Michoacán state. What was the precise source of these ideas? To what extent were these ideas practiced at the annex school among four-and five-year-old children rather than merely left at the level of theoretical instruction in the normal school? Were Gómez’s ideas edited by his normal school professors? We may never know the answers to these questions. But the very presence of these ideas in modern education, written just three months after John Dewey’s 1926 study trip to Mexico, opens up the possibility that some of the tenets of pragmatist thought were infiltrating the minds of the young schoolteachers of the nation.23
Félix Gómez was not alone. Another handwritten document by a young schoolteacher from the rural normal school at Tacámbaro, Michoacán, supports the role of the pragmatist critique of formalistic education in the educational institutions of Mexico’s still evolving nation: In the old school “it was simply understood that the students would work, like the teeth of the wheel of a grand machine without enjoying any of the benefits of their excessive labors, by force of the teacher who would give loud orders or harsh punishments.… But today this method no longer exists in the schools. It is not the teacher who obligates one to work, but love itself, or interest in the thing that the student is dedicated to learning.” Like a divine wind, the student wrote, a new school had been created. “The day came when the winds of progress came and broke apart the walls of the old school, leaving it clear to everyone in general, that, like the dictum that is repeated in the Decalogue of El Maestro Rural, ‘My school in the true house of the people.’ ”24 In a different example, schoolteacher-in-training María Chávez exhibited the new philosophical principles as they had been introduced in rural Mexico in a celebration of the career of the sixteenth-century Catholic bishop Vasco de Quiroga. Among the episodes in Mexican history that the Americans celebrated when they began arriving in Mexico in the early 1930s were the open-air academies of Vasco de Quiroga, whose sixteenth-century policies in education and self-government among the Tarascan Indians of Michoacán continue to be honored by some in Michoacán today. Often counterposed to the scorched-earth policies of Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, Quiroga’s
