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

C h a p t e r 4 The School and Society Mexico’s scientific state was central to the civil rights career of educational philosopher George Isidore Sánchez as well. Long known as one of the prominent figures of the civil rights movement in the American West for his work alongside such luminaries of racial liberalism as Carey McWilliams , Loren Miller, and Hector Garcia, Sánchez grew to regional stature as a result of forty years of political activism in New Mexico and Texas from his position as a professor of philosophy and education at the University of Texas at Austin. But although he has been principally associated with the American West, Sánchez once wrote that Mexico’s scientific state had been the single most important influence on his intellectual and political career. Deweyan philosophy, meanwhile, was pivotal to his political activism. Not only did John Dewey’s Democracy and Education became the foundation on which Sánchez constructed his critique of public education in the 1930s, but pragmatism in Mexico’s public schools continued to be the model of progressive change that he celebrated through the 1940s. These important episodes in his career become evident only when we analyze the influence of Mexico’s postrevolutionary institutions on his understanding of the role of the state in fostering social change. That influence becomes obvious when we look at his travel to Mexico’s rural villages in 1935 and consider the social and intellectual connections he made to Mexico’s misiones culturales as a result of Moisés Sáenz’s own immersion in the ideas of Dewey. Mexican postrevolutionary reform practices, these considerations show, became his primary filter for understanding social conflict in the American West. 138 Chapter 4 The New Mexico Melting Pot Little in George Sánchez’s early life suggested that he would study policy reform in Mexico’s scientific state. He lived in the industrial mining centers of Arizona before settling with his parents in the agricultural villages that surrounded Albuquerque in the years before World War I. He was raised in Barelas, one such community, from age six before working as a menial laborer during adolescence to provide for his mother. When an opportunity presented itself to work as a teacher in a village school in the Sandia Mountains that block the approach to Albuquerque from the east, he embarked on a career in education and philosophy that lasted until his death in 1972. But he continued to work as a laborer on the side and to attend night school at the University of New Mexico, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in education in 1930. At the University of Texas at Austin, he subsequently earned a master’s degree for an educational study of New Mexico’s rural schools prepared under Hershel T. Manuel, the American professor whose work had been cited by Mexico’s diplomatic service during the Lemon Grove desegregation case in 1931. In Austin, Sánchez began to make political connections that reflected his growing understanding of the role of social policy in structuring New Mexico society, even as those connections helped launch a career of some acclaim. In a series of memos to the state superintendent of New Mexico’s schools, he urged the New Mexico state government to establish a statistical agency that could track the educational attainment of the state’s pupils. The superintendent immediately sent memoranda to the same philanthropy that had underwritten Loyd Tireman’s San José Laboratory School, the General Education Board. ‘‘The work of the General Education Board in providing for the establishment of divisions of information and statistics in state departments of education in several Southern states has come to the attention of the leaders of education in New Mexico,’’ Georgia Lusk wrote to the Rockefeller philanthropies in March 1931. ‘‘After a careful study of the peculiar needs of public education in this state, we have decided to request the General Education Board to establish a division in the State Department of Education here.’’1 Within three years the census bureau Sánchez had suggested was drawing the attention of progressive educators throughout the nation for its studies in educational theory and rural education. As he considered the opportunity four years later to study state policy in Mexico, the officers of the GEB praised his reformist work. ‘‘As you doubtless know, I am not only [18.218.38.125...

Share