In every social entity, the key to understanding educational institutions and practices is the nature of the new or professional middle class. This has been defined in European societies as both the author and benefi- ciary of education. In the case of Mexico, we have found that its search for cultural capital goes far beyond that of their European counterparts because in the past other avenues were not as readily available. We also found that this middle class is different because it is also created by the state and therefore doubly beholden to it. We suggested this could explain the apparent disparity between an often- revolutionary rhetoric and a distinctly conservative- oriented set of practices.
In the literature, the descriptive term ‘middle class’ is generally used in two different yet sometimes overlapping ways. The first refers to those who have accumulated physical capital largely through their activities as small entrepreneurs, and related professionals and managers. They are not necessarily independent of large state- run or state- sponsored bodies in a large number of countries where the state formally and informally is sometimes indistinguishable from what are the productive sectors. They do not often achieve the relative political independence from the state that is a characteristic of Anglo- Saxon and European countries. The second refers to those who have accumulated cultural capital, as is
the case of Mexico, and have been created by and/ or are dependent on the state. They are charged with managing state institutions and include associated professionals usually certified by state bodies. The dual need of establishing and preserving institutions that allow the accumulation of cultural capital highlights the importance of educational institutions for this group.
In part, a sotto voce theme in the development of Latin American societies has been the middle classes striving for self- certification as well as developing those institutions that would underwrite that pro- cess. So long as the middle class was a junior partner its voice could not be heard, nor could it constitute the types of alliances that the middle classes were able to achieve in Europe, because their potential allies were seen as enemies of the state and were suppressed by middle-class institutions. Radical middle- class organizations that strongly influenced if not dominated public discourse like the Fabian Society in Britain had and have no real counterpart outside the academic world in countries like Mexico. Only when the stability guaranteeing social peace seemed to become permanent after 1946 and the state- provided training institu- tions became more professional was the middle class able to even begin to imagine establishing its own hegemony and dream more realistically about becoming independent of the state. The process was accelerated by competition for positions and the effects of world trade agreements, and therefore the Mexican middle class gravitated towards the right of the political spectrum, strongly conditioned by its wish to transfer cul- tural capital into physical capital.
In the light of what for many was the hoped- for eclipse of the cor- porativist state, as a result of the election in 2000, the door was open to such changes. At first glance the Mexican middle class appeared to be in a better position to mould institutions and practices according to its image. The victory of the right- of- centre National Action Party was there- fore an important step in that process and its educational programme a recognition of that important change. Ironically, at least for a time, it also freed the middle classes from a contradictory Weltanschauung and opened the door on empirical research, which, if we take the work of Carlos Muñoz Izquierdo (2009) as an example, revealed the catastrophic failure of the educational system to deliver. However, the contradiction between a middle class formed by cultural capital and one formed by physical cap ital remained, the new regime accommodated to the corpo- rative institutional arrangements. The struggle proved to be a much more complex one than found in Europe and was reflected in the very policies and administrative procedures of the new government.
Hence, from 2000 to 2012, with the election of Vicente Fox, the standard bearer of the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), as president, followed by Felipe Calderón Hinojosa in 2006, for the first time since 1917 the groups that coalesced into the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (the aptly named Institutional Revolutionary Party) were no longer in power. But the transition from a corporativist state to what the new leaders described as a liberal democracy never took place. Institutional continuity was maintained and the agencies continued to operate much as before. We have suggested that the agencies were never designed for implementation but for the maintenance by default of the status quo and that these agencies themselves have absorbed the professional middle classes to such an extent that the new middle classes perceive any such changes as against their interests.
As a result of our analysis of education in Mexico we suggest that future research and the construction of educational reform programmes need to take into account the following: an educational process cannot be analysed as institutions and practices removed from the socio- economic context in which they are situated; educational processes are political sites involved in the construction and control of discourse, meaning and subjectivities, and the common- sense values and beliefs that guide and structure any educational practice are not a priori universals, but social constructions based on specific normative and political assumptions. We should never take these for granted and should regard them, as Bourdieu (2005) argues, as ‘cultural arbitraries’.
The structural theorists of modern anthropology have analysed what they call social apprenticeship in this way. More recently, social research has moved in that direction. We hope that in this work we have provided sufficient empirically based evidence for the development of a fruitful dialogue between these two hitherto different approaches that will enhance our understanding of education institutions and practices and help us to overcome the in- built and seemingly insuperable obstacles to the implementation of equitable, viable and sustainable educational reforms.
Since Gilberto Guevara (1992) published his essays on educational failure in the Mexican system, many Mexican and overseas commenta- tors are aghast at what appears to be a dysfunctional system that has impeded the country from moving up the sacred performance league table of education achievement set by the OECD. However, they miss the point that in terms of its original purpose, it was not one of selection but of emphasizing social control and in that sense, it has been mostly successful. Indeed, in socio- anthropological terms no institution is ever
dysfunctional. By layering institution upon institution as occurs every sexenio, to the extent that in one of the larger states there were 17 organ- izations set up at different times to research curriculum innovation, has the advantage of providing real and phantom jobs to satisfy the thirst for patronage, but obviously makes such research impossible. At a certain point reality has to creep in and lead to the conclusion that the greatest impediment to a meaningful education are the institutions themselves that deal with this important area of social life. Defining the obstacle is perhaps the first step in finding a way forward.
This study, in part, has had the middle class as its protagonist. By focusing on its constitution, its vicissitudes and alliances one can begin to form a clearer picture of the evolution of Mexican society that goes beyond the historical myths that were created to build and maintain a sense of nationhood. Aside from some of the biographical studies of Enrique Krauze (1997, 2008) and hints in the writing of other commen- tators, we have no studies that are anything more than anecdotal. A final irony is that in these unequal and heterogeneous societies, the new or professional middle class as we have defined it at the outset of this work is essential if meaningful reforms are to be put into practice. Because of changes in the division of labour that require coordination, administra- tion and aspects of social control, the non- entrepreneurial middle class has become increasingly important for the functioning of systems of mechanical solidarity. These changes coincided not only with their wish for professionalism but also for them a fortuitous change in the demands of the labour market that required more professionals. This is because it plays a crucial role in the authorship of educational systems and prac- tices and also the champion and protector of much that is necessary in education. When, as is the case in most Latin American countries, the participation of the middle class in state education falls below a certain level, state education loses its cutting edge. The Fabian reformers and their allies in the educational world could only devise and enact those reforms which opened up schooling because of a solid middle class oper- ating within certain historical determinants and because of its alliance with working- class organizations.
Until now in Mexico, not only has such an alliance been impos- sible but also, in addition, the new middle class, for historical and social reasons, sees the working class and, more importantly, the much larger sector constituting the marginal populations, as potential and dangerous competitors. In Mexico, the agents for such reforms are a tiny sector in which most of the professional middle class largely does not participate. Because of these assumptions, authority was not seen
as delegated but treated as a synonym for power. The few historical studies of the evolution of national education systems are not entirely useful because they tend to operate within a functionalist model that assumes that once an institution is created, it has the scope and hence the freedom to make decisions independently. This means that the mainstream theoretical models that have been constructed do not help us to understand the origin of and changes in the relations between society and its systems of social apprenticeship. For that reason, they do not help us to recognize why most education reforms are not deliv- ered in ways that are intended by the progenitors of these reforms. From the outset, the observations that were made of the growing influence of the state with its ability to penetrate into all walks of life, positively and negatively, established the basis for the idea of state neutrality and state intervention, which meant that the state could be seen as operating at a level above society and social conflict. These ideas solidified to constitute the basic assumptions of both social scien- tists and policymakers.
This conflating of bureaucratic ideals with actual practice is com- mon in all branches of public policy writing. But it is also a view that enters into and fixes itself in the popular imagination. We tend to talk of the government or the state interchangeably (as if it was a unified entity or a person), deciding everything from the distribution of com- puters to schools to developing a new and supposedly more relevant curriculum. We assume that it will happen as it is planned. There may be obstacles, but we need to find ways to overcome them by fine- tuning and clarifying the rules for implementation, or so the thinking goes. It is common to see educational policy interventions or the external promotion of educational reforms as being without ulterior motives and above political and personal interests. But those who have been involved in policy development know that sooner or later they will find they are caught up in a complex web of social, economic and political cross- currents.
Hence, we need to analyse Mexican education as part of a whole social formation. This is what Pierre Bourdieu (2005) and with Passeron (1977), and Basil Bernstein (1998) have done, and we have drawn upon their work to advance parts of our argument. But this cannot be done in the abstract, which is why we have placed so much importance on field data and a conception of formal educational arrangements inter- acting with the informal, rather than arguing from formal educational policy downwards, thereby relegating and minimizing these other social entities.