The socialisation of educational problems and the rise of illiteracy in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT In the past two decades, the interdisciplinary push to denaturalise the concept of society has historicised the very object of social history. In this paper, I propose a way of studying the social history of education that eludes the presupposition of the social as a transcendental or pre-discursive object. My central claim is that it is possible to observe a process of socialisation regarding educational problems. This means that the social and society were not simply concepts that created a new object of knowledge, but rather that they became a visualisation principle that allowed for the abstraction of categories and made observable a set of relationships. These notions are contained and articulated in how social problems were produced, observed, performed, and acted upon by educational and political actors. I will do this by examining the production of illiteracy (analfabetismo in Spanish) as a social problem in Mexico in the first decades of the twentieth century. I argue that two fundamental processes rendered illiteracy a social problem. First, the development of statistical knowledge and methods made it possible to know the number of people who did not read and write, creating the illiterate as a statistical category. The second is the articulation of this statistical reality as a generalised problem by education experts and authorities. In this sense, literacy was abstracted and framed as an essential feature for the proper functioning of a modern society.