The Láinez law in the province of Santa Fe during the first half of the twentieth century: some notes on its implementation

Abstract

In 1905, the National Congress passed the law known as the Láinez Law - in reference to its promoter - which allowed the National Education Council to create schools in the provinces that requested them, especially in rural areas. From then on and until its transfer, which ended in 1978, schools of different jurisdictions coexisted in the provinces. This coexistence was part of the construction of the education system and at the same time was the object of dispute linked to federalism as a principle of organisation and territorial distribution. In this article, without losing the general view of the process, we focus on the province of Santa Fe during the first half of the 20th century. We propose to analyse how local and provincial actors positioned themselves in relation to national officials and policies. We start from the hypothesis that the provincial authorities and the local press supported different projects regarding the Láinez schools that at times coexisted: the creation of national schools, the nationalisation of provincial schools, the provincialisation of national schools and the closure or transfer of national schools. In order to carry out the research, we consulted regulations, official publications of the National Council of Education and files of the Parliamentary Secretariat of the Chamber of Deputies of the Nation, in dialogue with the press of the province of Santa Fe. We organise the contents of the text into three chronologically ordered sections corresponding to each of the stages mentioned above.