School boarding on argentine´s countryside´s Common Education expansion (1882-1939)

Abstract

In Argentina, the territorial extension and population dispersion characteristic of rural areas challenged the policies developed to extend common education.  In order to overcome these obstacles, various organisational arrangements were tried out from the mid-19th century onwards. Their effectiveness was widely debated well into the 20th century.

The aim of this article is to describe the historical process of the emergence of one of these modalities, the school boarding of children living in scattered rural areas. It also describes the arguments used to support and oppose this. To this purpose, documents from the period 1880-1938 are analysed, as well as publications in the magazine El Monitor de la Educación Común and minutes of legislative sessions held when specific regulations were being discussed.

School boarding was not provided for in the national regulations on common education in the nineteenth century, so its operation was regulated at the end of the 1930s with the adoption of the Law for the Protection of Children of School Age. The consensus that emerged around this type of schooling took place in the context of the persistence of illiteracy and the effects of the economic and social crisis that worsened after 1929. It introduced new elements into the debate. Arguments were put forward regarding the formative effects of these institutions, the feasibility of their development, the rootedness of the population in the countryside, and social support for poor children.