Health, illness, and schools in Argentina: marks of epidemics in the history of a changing relation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the connections between health, illness and education from a historical perspective, aiming at providing clues for understanding these relationships that, as demonstrated in recent global events, cannot be analyzed separately. Over the centuries, societies have always found different ways of educating their new generations and deal with their health problems. The relationship between education and illness has varied throughout history, but in certain extreme cases, such as epidemics, this relationship intensifies and becomes more evident. Each particular situation affected the educational system and the school institutions in different ways, as it changed the life of teachers, pupils and their families, represented pedagogical challenges, and marked all of them at different levels and had an impact on their futures.This focuses on the marks left in education by certain events that took place during the epidemic since the foundation of the modern educational system until more recent times in Argentina. Such events are the succession of “plagues” from 1870 to 1920 (as the “Yellow Fever” in 1871 and the “Spanish Flu” in 1918) during the modernization processes, as well as the “Poliomyelitis Outbreak” in 1956 during the political struggle between Peronism and anti-Peronism. In both cases, we will try to a) reconstruct the ways in which society and specially school institutions went through these epidemics, b) analyze the close and changing bonds between health and education, which turned the school into a privileged space where that bond was enhanced, and c) present the consequences regarding instruction.