Rural teachers training and school health, 1935-1945

Abstract

The work we present here is part of a broader investigation in which we report some phenomena that, from our point of view, have influenced the construction of negotiations as a strategy to get the attention and response from the authorities in the Rural Normalism. Whether in daily relationships between teachers and students, between the students of a particular school and their national leadership, between students and local authorities or through official regulations, Rural Normal Schools life is involved in constant negotiation, a negotiation that accounts for the assisted autonomy that was built as a result of these interactions from their own origins in the mid-thirties of the 20th century in these institutions. Rural Normal Schools in Mexico have historically had to fight for their political recognition, despite the fact that investigations and historiography of the last decades in this field have generally been produced in contexts of critical and violent events. This time we pay attention to situations related to health care and school hygiene. In recognizing the government’s interest in promoting health care in schools, we focus particularly on identifying the main diseases that afflict Rural Normal Schools and the ways in which the authorities of these schools looked out for them between 1939 and the forties, when they worked with mixed enrollment. In addition to the literature of the time referring to the subject, for the realization of this work, the consultation of documents on some archives of Rural Normal Schools, the Historical Archive of Secretariat of Public Education and the General Archive of the Nation has been highly important.