Schools, collective social project, and pedagogical renewal: the experience of the Brigades of little teachers (Chile, 1929-1930)

Resumen

In Chile, the dictatorship of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1927-1931) carried out a series of educational reforms. The New School movement inspired those transformations. Although in the first stage, the dictatorship promoted a reformist process of a radical nature conducive to transforming the school system, since 1929 the Ministry of Public Education established that pedagogical renewal would be tested exclusively in experimental schools. However, as the famous Swiss pedagogue Adolfo Ferrière pointed out after he visited the country, the reformist desire for public education prompted Chilean teachers to incorporate the New School’s ideas into daily school life. The teachers did not limit renewal to the controlled and limited space of experimental schools. The organization of complementary educational activities - practically all a collective nature - is an example of the above. At the base of these was the consideration that girls and boys were social actors. This article aims to describe and analyze a specific children’s group, the Little Teachers Brigades. We analyze documentary sources, photographic, and sources like the newspaper La Nación and the journal Revista de Educación. We demonstrate the active role of teachers and students in creating a new school and reducing illiteracy. Likewise, it is proposed that the BPM were part of a set of mechanisms and strategies that the dictatorship deployed to attract popular support and, in this way, try to restore social order, in a context of expansion and restructuring of the State.