About the “Uselessness” of the Assistants and Sub-tutors on Teaching Reading. Towards the Normalization of Teaching Reading in Schools in Buenos Aires (1880-1900)

Abstract

On the second half of the nineteenth century important changes were made in western written culture, including a new value given to literacy in order to achieve cultural homogeneity and constitute a nation. The teachers were the ones charged with fulfilling this “mission”, therefore we can consider them significant agents in these transformations.
However, these agents did not constitute a homogeneous entity, free of conflict. In fact, complaints from school inspectors were often received, in which assistants and sub-tutors were deemed inexperienced and their performances, underwhelming.
In this article we try to contextualize the radical transformation of the educational system in the city of Buenos Aires, at a time of profound change from a social, demographic and material perspective.
From the pedagogical point of view, the conceptions and practices involved in the acts of “teaching” and “reading” were also being transformed. All of this made the old pedagogical practices obsolete and placed the personnel without formal studies far from the pedagogic recommendations of both the directors and inspectors.
Our main sources are reports of the inspectors who visited the schools, since they allow us to know aspects of the pedagogical teaching practices in which assistants, teachers and inspectors intervened; with perspectives not always shared. These reports are a primary source for the analysis of these practices, although they are filtered by the vision of supervisors (professionals, bearers of ideology and of certain political and pedagogical conceptions) who —in general— advocated for eradicating sub-tutors and assistants´ practices that many of them considered outdated.