The 1970-1976 education reform in Mexico

Abstract

This article examines the education reform enacted in the earlier half of the 1970s in Mexico, as a paradigmatic case of the effect of criticism and social movements on the formation of government programs. The historical process is reconstructed on the basis of the concept of regimes of governmentality, developed by Foucault (1991) and the so-called Anglo-Foucauldian scholars Burchel, Gordon and Miller (1991); Rose (1999); Dean (1999); and Rose, O’Malley and Valverdes (2006). The text discusses the formation and development of a mentality of government that reflects on the educational movements of 1968 and 1971 as expressions of the growing illegitimacy of the institutions of political control, school, family and political authority. In response to that burgeoning rejection, it became necessary to overhaul and refashion the intervening authorities, the purposes, media and institutions of biopolitical control. In particular, the educational reform of 1973 was an attempt to reshape the processes of subjectivation that had been being employed since the 1968 crisis, and to integrate controls over citizens’ daily lives into the powers of the State security apparatus.