In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The decade of the 1940s marked a new historical moment in the relationship between colonial state building, schools, and citizens. The colonial school system continued to expand. Communities witnessed the building of more schools, hiringofmoreteachers ,andenrollmentofmorestudents.However,atthesametime, a larger total number of school-age children were not able to attend school. In 1946 the total population of school-age children was 663,376. Fifty-two percent of the children attended schools. The remaining 317,599 did not.1 The growing school-age population in the 1940s, those inside and outside the classroom, made ever greater demands on the colonial state. A larger total number of students demanded access to the classroom. This chapter turns its attention to this growing demand for access to schools by students and parents. Demographics alone cannot explain the intensified interest in securing access to schools. The 1940s was a decade of great social, economic , and political change in Puerto Rico. Colonial reformers, embodied in the newly founded Partido Popular Democrático (PPD, Popular Democratic Party), emerged with a social justice agenda that gained support from the majority of the working class. A change from the radical politics and state violence of the 1930s, the PPD came to power through the support of the working class. The PPD carried out a successful political campaign, and its representatives were elected to the colonial legislature. The new representatives of the colonial state had made promises to the working class during their campaigns. Parents and students had been listening to those promises. Access to schools was one of them. The new intensity behind the demands for access to education in the 1940s was also a reflection of the dynamic social change of the populist era. 150 chapter 5 Parents and Students Claim Their Rights When they approved and funded public law no. 55 in 1949, Puerto Rican legislators generated a new scholarship opportunity for poor, talented, public schoolchildren. They could not have imagined the overwhelming response the scholarship would generate. By supporting the scholarship, they also, significantly, fostered great hope and aspiration. In theory, public schools had been free and open to all students since 1899. In practice, a limited number of working-class children could pursue the privilege of attending school. Sending a child to school meant withdrawing his or her labor from the home, field, or factory. The new scholarship, however, allowed parents and children to imagine they might receive the bit of support and assistance they required to finally pursue a public education . The opportunity was also celebrated by extended family and the broader community as well as teachers, social workers, and principals. Once the scholarship fund was founded and publicized, students and parents aggressively pursued it. In the process, they declared their rights as citizens and clarified their expectations of the colonial state. The colonial state, meanwhile, as represented through the bureaucracy of the Department of Education in the 1940s, struggled to meet the demands of the citizenry—access to public schools. By the late 1940s it had become increasingly clear to working-class parents and students that the colonial state, now represented by the PPD, was unable to implement the promised reforms that would guarantee their children access to public schools. Parents and students wrote letters of complaint, in which they made their demands as citizens before the colonial state. Through these letters, historians are able to document parent and student visions for schools and the role of education in their lives. Their voices, which were harder to document in the earlier years of the twentieth century, emerge loudly and confidently. Student voices, first and foremost, undermined the derogatory characterizations teachers and colonial state officials had proposed about poor students and parents in earlier generations. Since the 1910s, teachers had crafted an image of students as obstacles. Students and their parents required reform and regeneration at the hands of teachers . Otherwise, students and parents would prove to be the primary challenge to the progress of the patria. Teachers proposed that it was their responsibility (the profession) to pursue literacy campaigns, promote physical education, and rebuild the home through the school for the benefit of the patria. Rarely were students or parents characterized as enthusiastic participants in this process of regeneration. Instead, it appeared that students and poor families had become unwilling targets of colonial reform. However, the student and parent voices that emerged in the 1940s challenge the characterizations earlier proposed by teachers and state officials. In fact, student letters turn traditional arguments...

Share