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The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.Education plays an important role in the modernization process. Literacy rates, the educational content at varying levels, and access to schools and universities are often linked to social mobility and potential political mobilization. This article examines the qualitative and quantitative aspects of Argentine education between 890 and I914, a period when that country underwent the first slow, grinding steps of modernization.Two differing types of evidence are utilized. Official pronouncements, laws, and contemporary testimony are employed to show the intellectual roots of educational attitudes and ideas as perceived and set forth in the legal sphere. These documents picture a rapidly expanding and improving educational system modeled on those of the more industralized nations. The second set of data, drawn from national and local censuses and from quantitative studies, confronts the former image. They reveal the system's vast inequalities, cast doubt upon its efficacy, and question the overall impact of changes at the primary and secondary levels in every aspect save the connection between education and nationalism. This paper thus indicates the value of employing social science techniques to test the validity of assertions made by contemporaries and to dissect global statistics.The nature of reform initiated by elites is also examined, and the data suggest that stated aims become concrete realities only when they conform to the needs of those who occupy positions of power. In Argentina, at least, the majority of the population remained minimally literate despite paper pronouncements and official statistics. This phenomenon, if universally true in modernizing societies, may lead to a reexamination of the exact role of education and literacy in developing areas. One classic formulation of a Latin American model, for example, claims that education for the masses received strong impetus from economic development, that education ceased to be a luxury and became a necessity, that the demand for trained personnel outran the Hobart A. Spalding, Jr. is Assistant Professor of History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is the author of La clase trabajadora argentina. Docinuentos para sit historia, 1890-1912 (Buenos Aires, I970); "Positivism in Argentina," in Ralph Lee Woodward (ed.), Positivism in Latin America, 150o-1goo (New York, I97I); and is currently finishing a book on organized labor in Latin America. This content downloaded from...
