Resumen de Learning for Life or Learning from Books: Reading Practices in Mexican Rural Schools (1900 to 1935)
This article furthers our understanding of the uses of textbooks within the complex social history of school cultures. It focuses on rural schools in an indigenous region of central Mexico, before and after the Mexican revolution (1910-1921). Two contextual factors are highlighted. First, the gradual displacement of the native language by the dominant Spanish used in schools. Secondly, the pedagogical discourses that discouraged the use of textbooks in teaching and stressed �learning for life�. These circumstances shed light on the fragmentary evidence of available textbooks and actual classroom practice. I suggest that the period witnessed a shift in classroom cultures, from the intensive reading of religious and moral texts that were possibly familiar to the children, towards the extensive, silent reading of textbooks on a variety of subjects. However, native children had still to bridge a considerable gap between their own life and language and the printed Spanish they encountered in schools
