Validez y confiabilidad

As previously suggested, the social structure and the history of Mexican society is fundamentally different in origin and its current structure from those of, for example, the United Kingdom, France or Germany. These societies function as relatively liberal capitalist societies where conflict has been reduced to operations within what have become established and accepted political institutions. In these societies, there is a unitary system for the distribution of material and symbolic values based upon a general consensus that underlies the legitimation of these institutions. In order to understand Mexican society, it is important to put to one side assumptions that stem from that social settlement, and examine more closely the relationship between social groups in Mexico. Only then can we discuss allocation mechanisms and understand how they function in the realm of education.

If this is true of the agencies it is equally true of the agents. The descriptive terms, middle class, working class and so forth have precise meanings within metropolitan contexts. These meanings are derived from the complex relationship between social groups that generate the agencies and can modify or even eliminate them. The terms cannot be applied to Mexican society without first being contextualized by the very different and equally complex relationship between social groups in that society.

The wealth of this middle segment of society has little to do with physical capital. Because of their training and position in society they are vocal and also can be creative. Their property, that is, cultural cap- ital, is their ability to manage and control. This segment of the middle class is composed of a body of specialized agents with specific interests and specific educational needs. Like traditional shamans as described by the structural anthropologists, their role, in part, is the concealment of domination through hidden rules regarding the generation of material and symbolic values. In terms of functions, this new middle class is com- posed of regulators, repairers, diffusers, shapers and executors. In terms of social reproduction, they require a rigorous system of professionaliza- tion through education. Hence, the middle class, as a whole, is both the beneficiary and author of the education system, and recent ideological conflicts over education are characterized as resulting from the differing views of the commercial and the professional middle classes. Therefore, if we suggest that the principal means for allocation within Mexican soci- ety is corruption, we imply something very different from the term used every day within metropolitan societies; the very term that metropolitan political sociology has found impossible to translate into an analytical tool for understanding Mexican society.

What do we mean when we say that corruption is the heart and essence of Mexican society? Here our starting point must be a review of what is meant by a corporativist society. Whilst generally working within a capitalist framework, corporativist systems are largely governed by centralized institutions where social, political and economic power is shared out among the elites of various and sometimes competing groups, none of which can obtain hegemony over the others on their own. The alliances – if one can use that term to describe an uneasy system based on mutual suspicion – are usually unstable and have been held together and continue to be maintained by what can be best described as mutual defence pacts. An intricate system of checks and balances is repeated within every governmental institution from the top to the lower posi- tions. This means that any reform or suggested innovation has to be so

rigorously examined that often it does not survive the process of scrutiny. Hence, to the evident chagrin of international banks and their associated agencies, purely economic aims are ultimately sacrificed to the aim of maintaining social cohesion; as are education aims. Indeed, the process of educational reform is made all the more difficult because although major stakeholders have some kind of representation within the min- istry, the outside agencies nonetheless still reserve, as we will see, the right to intervene in the process. In extreme cases they take to the streets to oppose a process, innovation or reform to which they are formally committed.

Whilst in the economic sphere private enterprises are often domi- nant within the processes of decision making and, indeed, members of the same family act from outside and inside the ministry, many of their aims are consciously attenuated and, indeed, sacrificed in order to main- tain social order. That is, at best the system is based on compromises worked out by the elites of the hitherto competing sectors who congeal into an elite of their own. This elite has, in recent times, expanded greatly and has, in some cases, developed its own agenda.

The weakness of the Mexican version of such a socio- political arrangement is that it is based upon mutual suspicion and, for this new and highly educated elite, that it thwarts the achievement of its own desired ends in order to avoid challenge and conflict. However, this new managerial elite develops its own norms, rules and systems of social pro- motion that can come into conflict even with its sponsoring organiza- tions. Promotion is achieved not through merit but through networking usually funnelled through a single agency like a political organization and its ancillaries. Each elite distributes positions through its ranks based upon service to that elite or the overall system. In liberal democratic soci- eties with precise rules and regulations for promotion, this fundamen- tally different system of distribution is generally called corruption.

Hence, a corporativist system of social and political control relies on the networking established by co- option and sometimes especially created social groups. Networking usually refers to the complex system of rewards and processes of mutual help and promotion within family units and political units. Claudio Lomnitz (2000) used the term to describe the survival of marginal social groups and it can be extended to encompass the complex system of relations between groups whose first priority is an avoidance of conflict. This involves sacrificing immediate interests for a complicated process of negotiation and reward, which has little to do with talent as defined through the theory of human capital or a notion of merit based upon competence rather than performance.

The role of organizing and maintaining a central system of values and what we can call the social controllers whose shaman- like task it is to oversee those processes is very much more important than in liberal democratic societies, because the institutions they control are necessar- ily of greater importance and extend to areas such as culture that the political institutions of liberal democratic societies do not touch. In such a society, more stress is therefore placed upon education as a controlling rather than an allocation device and its systems of curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation are vitiated by messages of the need to operate within the acceptable framework. It is also important to note that whilst a cor- porativist structure seems to be stable, that stability is not necessarily as immutable as it might seem. A corporativist configuration is successful only so long as the main and overriding priority is social order. Once that priority changes, or is perceived to have changed, the delicate alliance that by nature restricts the aspirations of the participating social groups may unravel.

A comparison between corporativist systems is difficult because there are few examples of such systems lasting for more than a relatively short period of time and the nature of those systems varies because of the structure of the societies for and in which they have been created. We will see that this was the basis of the Mexican state that emerged from the chaotic revolutionary period that began in 1910 when the established society imploded. We will also see that since the opening up of Mexico, the hallmark of which was the NAFTA agreement that came into effect in 1994, and the enormous influence of the millions of Mexicans and their families who emigrated to the United States whilst retaining significant links in the country of their origin, this has been somewhat, but perhaps less than one has imagined, attenuated.

Another term that requires definition is that which characterizes the agent managing the search for and the maintenance of a social con- sensus, that is, the middle class, which takes a particular form in Mexico. We must be careful using the concept of social class in the Mexican con- text. Not only is the concept socially specific but also dependent upon the relative homogeneity of the relations of production within a social entity and to date, despite many interesting explorations, we still do not possess a general term that helps us to understand the nature of Mexican society. For our immediate purpose the definition of social class we are using is a modification of that used by Basil Bernstein (1998). Social classes and relations between them are constituted by and also constitute inequali- ties in the distribution of material and symbolic power. These are derived from and realized through the creation, organization, distribution,

legitimation and reproduction of both the material and symbolic values arising out of the prevailing social division of labour of which they are a part.

Whilst there has been in Mexico since the late nineteenth century a small urban bourgeoisie engaged in business and commerce, yet far larger and far more important has been that social group who conceive of themselves as a middle class but are largely professional in nature, sur- viving by an accumulation of cultural rather than economic capital. It is a group whose principal role has been the running of institutions. It is not ‘middle class’ as an intermediary between an aristocracy and peasantry or proletariat, as in nineteenth- century France, but a middle class which is the agent of a small office- holding power elite (largely recruited from themselves) who constitute the state apparatus. Every different forma- tion of the middle class in the modern world has, of all the social groups, incorporated the most directly perceivable interest and role in educa- tion both in terms of social control and of its own perpetuation. But each middle class is conditioned by different socio- historical and political set- tings of which the Mexican is one of the most distinctive. Certainly, this Mexican middle class is the group least studied, an irony in itself since from the very beginning of the social sciences most of its practitioners are themselves from this very social group.

In a sense, it is no exaggeration to argue that the history of educa- tional systems and practices in corporativist societies is the autobiography of its agent, the middle class. This can be readily seen in Mexico because the middle class was created largely by the corporativist state and schizo- phrenically, both supported that consensus whilst seeking to escape its embrace. Its adventures with the Socialist Education Movement of the 1930s, whilst seeking to educate its children in schools free from such an ideology; its institutional support of the secularization of education, whilst privately remaining Catholic; and its founding and then abandon- ment of state universities and polytechnics for private institutions, are part of our exploration.