education in Mexico as a system that was attempting to make the apprehension of meaning more transparent and tangible. In this regard, nothing was more important than the process that in Mexican historiography has come to be called “action-centered education.” In the tradition of Mexican historiography, the rituals of practice in Mexico’s rural schools have been widely condemned for their presumptions and attempts at labor control. Teaching such manual skills as gardening, sewing, furniture design, and basket making has been rightly critiqued as a means of emphasizing specific labor practices in the interest of promoting a particular form of economic production in postrevolutionary Mexico. Yet for the Americans, manual practice was more than mere production for the economy. It was, instead, the measure of an idea. It was what distinguished one thought from another, the link between an impression residing in the mind and a specific object, process, or relationship in the world that surrounded the human being. As Greg Grandin has recently pointed out in the case of Brazil, it is right to see experience in the progressive educational universe as amenable to labor control and the dictates of the teacher.36 But such a view does not exhaust what practice represented. If viewed though the language of psychology that was under development during the first half of the twentieth century, it also represented a way to comprehend how human beings made associations between thought and world. As such, practice was an inescapable component of knowing, a process that needed to be studied and refined in all the circumstances in which it took place. Such experiential practice was fundamental to Deweyan thought. For making associations in the world was a fundamental step in transforming the physical and social conditions in which human communities were enmeshed.37
Psychologist Loyd Tireman was the consummate example of the window into practice and action that rural education in Mexico represented when the Americans arrived to study state policy there. He had long been interested in the psychology of language as a process of thinking. In the laboratory schools of the American Midwest and American West where he had trained, the concern with drawing associations between word and object was the fundamental concern of a forty-year career in education. When he arrived in Mexico in 1931, he was quickly drawn to the use of guitars as instruments of practice in the rural schools of Hidalgo, as well as plays and skits as instruments for teaching history and cultural tradition. Such practices, he knew, had long been a staple of Deweyan laboratory schools across the American landscape, as John and Evelyn Dewey’s 1915 Schools of Tomorrow attested.38 Yet such techniques for understanding how the mind apprehends data routinely came up against a problem in psychology that remains a large stumbling block in social science work into the twenty-first century: how were educators and psychologists to design systems of learning for children whose native language was not English? In the context of New Mexico where Tireman worked, the dominant language was Spanish, a language for which he found a ready analog in postrevolutionary Mexico. Not labor control, but the fit between ideas in Spanish and practice in Mexico and New Mexico became the object of his search within the institutions of the Mexican state in the 1930s. Such minute observations by Tireman may seem otherworldly for scholars searching to tell the political history of twentieth-century Mexico. Yet the fact that such minuscule work was central to the Americans only underscores how important it is to interpret Deweyan pragmatism as something other than a defense of Fordist political economy.
The set of policy experiments that postrevolutionary Mexico represented made its cultural missions, rural normal academies, and rural schools institutions the Americans could profitably study as potential new instruments for social reconstruction in the United States. As practitioners of modernist ideas who had studied the thickness of Dewey’s wide-ranging thought, the Americans searched for clues about Dewey in Mexico that were broader than most contemporary scholars have assigned to them. The evidence suggests that some elements of Deweyan theory were being applied in the Mexican field to the wider spectrum of instruments that Dewey understood to be a part of social change. And it suggests that Mexican policy experimentation was useful to the Americans because it was a working system of interdependent institutions that represented the complicated relationship between education and the modern state rather than a complacent ethical pronouncement about local communities in a rapidly changing North America. The teacher, the importance of experience in learning, and the relationship of the student to the larger community were all instruments to be studied closely, the Americans knew. Given the large framework into which Dewey developed his philosophy, it makes sense to evaluate the presence of Dewey in Mexico by splintering the elements of education into its multiple parts and testing each one, rather than reducing Dewey to an unbreakable whole that must stand as a single test of ethics in the modern nation. It was not hope alone that had brought the Americans to study Mexico’s misiones culturales and casas del pueblo. In the face of a political project that was still unfolding, the Americans saw reform impulses of potential change in Mexico’s educational institutions that they adapted for their racial liberalism work in the United States. It was these impulses that attracted their attention, even as they acknowledged that transforming the social hierarchy was neither an instantaneous process nor one for which success was ever guaranteed.
The Convergence of Pragmatism and Indigenismo
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