From Instructio to Public Education: The Enlightenment, Liberalism, and Education in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Abstract

This article examines, from a historical-conceptual perspective, the transformation of the vocabularies of education and instruction in the Hispanic world between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular attention to the Mexican case. Drawing on dictionaries, pedagogical treatises, legislation, parliamentary debates, and specialized periodicals, it shows how both terms acquired differentiated meanings amid profound political, cultural, and social transformations. While instruction became increasingly associated with the regulated transmission of knowledge, discipline, and administrative intervention over populations, education retained for a longer period its connection with upbringing, moral formation, and affective ties within the family sphere. The article begins with the pastoral pedagogy and processes of Christianization in New Spain, then examines Enlightenment reformulations that linked teaching to public utility, progress, and social happiness, and subsequently analyzes liberal debates on public instruction and freedom of education in independent Mexico. Finally, it explores the incorporation of women into educational spaces during the nineteenth century, arguing that the feminization of teaching did not represent a break with the domestic order but rather the extension of its logic into the school setting. The article contends that the modern configuration of teaching emerged from the articulation of family, school, and state, in a process that simultaneously redefined the meanings of education and instruction as well as the mechanisms of social governance.