Politics and Education in Argentina, 1946-1962 by Monica Esti Rein

Author:Monica Esti Rein [Rein, Monica Esti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, General
ISBN: 9781315502724
Google: U36TDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30852516
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1997-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

Stamping Out Peronism

Is There an Educational Alternative?

Argentine schools at the beginning of the 1950s, as I showed in Part I, constituted an important channel for inculcating the justicialist ideology in the nation’s children. Using various resources—textbooks, curricula, school calendars, and so on—the Peronist regime sought to mold a generation of “new Argentines” who would identify with Perón and his works. Subsequently, the Liberating Revolution, wanting to deliver the nation from the “evils” of justicialism, also tried to make use of the education system and its potential for inculcating values and changing views. Just as General Perón’s populist regime, in its gradual slide away from democracy, had viewed controlling education as an important means of shaping a new national consciousness, so did the undemocratic military regime that succeeded it bend the education system to its own purposes, in this case to defend democracy—or so it claimed. The new regime’s first aim was therefore to cleanse the education system of the unmistakable imprint left on it by the deposed regime—which was now defined as a dictatorship.

As a result, the education ministry was once again shaken by a wave of political purges. New staff members were hired to replace those from the Peronist period; the justicialist textbooks were replaced by new books; all the lesson plans covering the Five-Year Plan, the 1949 constitution, and so on were scrapped, to be replaced by lessons in “democratic education”; holidays and ceremonies celebrating Peronist events such as Evita’s death (26 July) or “Loyalty Day” (17 October) were abolished; schools, auditoriums, and classrooms that bore names connected with the previous regime were rechristened; and the list goes on.

The two provisional military presidents who ruled the country successively after Perón’s overthrow based the formation of their own “new Argentina” mainly on their strong rejection of the regime they had deposed. The regime headed first by General Lonardi and subsequently by General Aramburu was far from democratic, despite its pretensions; as this chapter will show, this was reflected in the education system during this period and the regime’s efforts to remold it in the spirit of the Liberating Revolution. These presidents and their respective education ministers conveyed all their instructions to the education system in the form of decrees, since this was a military regime that had seized power unconstitutionally and operated without an elected parliament. Once again the Argentine schools underwent a transformation unmediated by public debate. A new indoctrination replaced the Peronist indoctrination. This time, however, no real ideological alternative was offered; the change consisted mainly in the elimination of everything that the new rulers considered wrong and harmful.

Frondizi’s presidency, too, offered little in the way of a democratic alternative, as noted in the previous chapter. This elected president, who throughout his term of office lived in fear of another military coup, was reluctant to implement any far-reaching changes in the education system; most of the rules in force in the schools during his tenure had been instituted by the generals before him. Frondizi focused most of

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