Jorge Tirzo Gómez *Universidad Pedagógica Nacional/ Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. English translation by Denisse Piñera Palacios.

In this text, we present a conceptual argumentation about contemporary Mexican education, and we take as our starting point the consideration of the educational process as a cultural proposal for the organization of society. Our main objective focuses on showing the significant nature of this social action and on outlining in a general way the constitutive elements of this symbolic system.

Presenting education as a symbolic system is equivalent to thinking about it as a complex set of institutionalized, signified and significant practices and ideas, within the sociocultural context of contemporary Mexico.

In order to profile the educational process as a symbolic system we need to start by reviewing its main meanings. Education means several things, and it is a significant space for the people who place functions and expectations on it. It symbolizes a form of social realization and, therefore, a way to conceive the world. It is a symbol of civilization, culture, knowledge and historical achievements. All these elements are connected to each other and shape this symbolic system that shares spaces, ideas an practices which allow our daily expression and the reinterpretation of meanings. Education in Mexico symbolizes social and individual development, and it prepares us for a future that must not forget the past. In brief, we can say that education: a) is a symbolic representation of society as a whole; b) symbolizes a conception of science and scientific knowledge; c) symbolizes the official history of society; and d) symbolizes national unity. For the time being, I only state these elements; I shall go back to them later on.

Far from thinking of the educational process as a simple instrument for the reproduction of a social system, the proposal starts by pointing out the always existing profound links between culture and education, between education and identity and, therefore, between culture and identity. This starting point takes into account the difference between education, as an endocultural process, and its institutionalization in modern societies.

This last manifestation of education is precisely what motivates these reflections, and although it is true that institutionalization implies a set of standards and social validity, this does not annul the subjective character of the process. Like all human processes, modern education is formed around values, myths and expectations.

Today’s education works as a system in which all those elements constitute a symbolic complex, which in the end works as a space where the ritual actions that revive the myths of the Mexican society’s culture and identity are put into practice.

In order to respond to this intention, the point of view of Symbolic Anthropology represents the option that allows us to interpret a reality filled with social sense. This text is framed within this anthropological perspective that conceives culture as a significant structure and symbolism as a possibility to access the logics of social organization.

Before we go into these reflections, it is pertinent to start by a brief view of the state of anthropology as a scientific discipline, and of education as the anthropological object of work.

Anthropology and education

Education is a subject that, at first sight, would seem to correspond to the field of anthropological reflection; the tradition of the scientific disciplines places it rather within the field of sciences such as pedagogy or psychology. For a long time, in order to find links between education and anthropology, a detour had to be taken and its field of application had to be specified, that is, it was necessary to talk about applied anthropology or about its field – in Mexico- , by antonomasia: Indigenous education.

Anthropological tradition has been in charge of analyzing the educational process under the context of cultural dynamics. In the anthropological discourse, the concepts used to explain the educational process have mainly been those of endoculturation, acculturation and socialization; besides, authors such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict have worked to this respect from the postulate of culture and personality. However, the treatment of education -as a concept and process– has been a relatively recent matter.

It is through the application of Mexican anthropology or of its field of action that we can initially place the works of anthropologists and educators, or of anthropologists-educators; we only have to remember the works of Moisés Sáenz Carapan. Bosquejo de una experiencia (1936); Manuel Gamio Forjando Patria (1916) or Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, El proceso de aculturación (1962). Apart from their theoretical texts, we must not forget their activities as founders of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Public Education).

Indigenous education presented itself as the field that merged the theory and practice of anthropology of education. This conceptual development was restricted for a long time to the direct work of some anthropologists with the Indigenous communities of the country, and it seemed to be the only possibility for an anthropological reflection of education. The crisis of and debate on the work of anthropology, and acculturation as a course of action, are documented in Andrés Medina’s work, La quiebra política de la antropología mexicana. ( 1983).

However, in time, this type of works changed due to at least two causes: the crisis of the acculturation proposal and the development of the field of educational sciences. The question of a policy of integration of the Indigenous communities to national society, from what they decided to call a scientific action that would develop the Indigenous communities entirely, derived in strong criticism that later on would allow the emergence of new theoretical statements of a different nature: Marxist, Neomarxist and of ethnodevelopment as well. The methodological integration proposal implied abandoning the isolated study of communities and proposed an integral work, a process in which education played an important role in cultural socialization and homologation. On the other hand, the educational field extended to always wider areas and spread the didactical aspect of teaching; the need for works on educational research caused the incursion in the once privative fields of anthropology, sociology, philosophy and linguistics, among others. Once more, education was considered as a social action in which subjects are involved in the reproduction or rather in the transformation of society. School, educational programs and teachers were once again considered as agents of society and not as entities left out of it, or in the best case, preparing for the future.

Nowadays, we witness a recomposition of the educational field, in which, gradually, education is not any longer solely considered as a molding action and can now be assumed as a symbolic system, intimately related to culture and to the history of the peoples.

Here is where anthropology offers wide perspectives for the interpretation of education as a structuring part of culture and as a documental part of culture’s daily expression. To this respect, the anthropologist Elsie Rockwell says: “Knowing the everyday school required the use of anthropological tools. Ethnography –the description of otherness- turned out to be the best way to document the way of life in this space which was so close and, at the same time, so ignored”.1 In the beginning, the contribution of anthropology to the field of education was incorporated to the generic denomination called qualitative research and, since the eighties, we see a wide range of research works considered as ethnography of education.2

In Mexico, anthropology and education have shared more than we might initially suppose because, united in the Indigenist action, they have worked for many years, or furthermore, their work has not stopped and nowadays anthropology continues to contribute interesting reflections about the educational field of the Indigenous groups, apart from entering in the field of educational action in general.

Education is a social action performed with defined purposes, with community responses, with human actions and deep cultural meanings. Education and culture are intimately connected processes in reality; the work of anthropology consists in documenting those relationships, in pointing out the participation of men, history and the institutions, and interpreting the symbolic processes that are constantly created and recreated. All cultural action is an educational action in itself, in the same way all educational action acquires meaning in the context of a particular culture.

Understanding the symbolic dimension of the educational action means thinking of society as to its need for unity and transcendence, and also means to interpret culture as a dynamic process furnished with meaning.

In Mexico, education has been one of the most efficient ways to propose and socialize a model of nation -process that ends with the validation of said model-, because as long as what is stated in it becomes the official version of the past, present and future of the country, society confers it legitimacy.

We should note that when we talk about education, we do not mean the wide cultural process of culture transmission; education necessarily starts from it but it specifically refers to its school aspect, expressed by means of the national educational system, that is, the institutionalization of the educational process whose expression is given through levels of knowledge, certifications, teachers, students and the existence of a bureaucratic apparatus.

The Mexican national state and the economic system have used education to regulate the needs of the work marketplace and to constitute a social model through practices and ideas developed in all the schools.

Education and symbolism

Talking about education and symbolism calls for certain delimitations; first of all, we should try to answer the following questions; is education a symbolic system?, what does education symbolize?, which symbols does it contain?, how have they been built?, what is the role of teachers and students in these processes?, what function does society assign to education?

In order to get into the analysis of Mexican education, we place this work within the perspective of Symbolic Anthropology, – a branch that allows us to interpret the present social sense, and to enter in the plot and logics of the constitution of a symbolic system related to a cultural reality. According to Marie-Odile Marión, Symbolic Anthropology intends to reconstruct the internal logic generated by cultures, through the analysis and reconstruction of the systems that derive from the social organization […]”3 In Mexico, one of the systems that derives from social organization is the educational symbolic system.

Symbolic Anthropology is a scheme of anthropological work that intends to interpret the symbolic universe of a society, to interpret its ritual processes and to explain its mythical complexes. Symbolic Anthropology can be a theoretical-methodological proposal according to the needs of the educational field, which is deeply symbolic, where myths of origin are recreated, where ritual systems are put into practice and social meaning is granted to cultural symbols. Each of these elements may be expressed separately or understood as a component of a whole, because “each part of the system conveys a meaning and reproduces a part of the whole”.4

In the educational field, symbolic anthropology allows us to observe a wide range of actions and concepts that nowadays are presented as a logical and coherent reality; it also shows this field as a complex symbolic system. On the other hand, Symbolic Anthropology offers us a perspective of proximity towards the actors of the educational process, considering them not as inert beings, but as subjects that voluntarily participate and bring to life myths, ceremonies and the symbolic system in general.

I agree with Mélich when he says that: “Education, as a social action, is a symbolic action, because all social actions are, one way or another, symbolic”.5 Education is symbolic because it is a social fact, that is to say, it is an action performed by people within a cultural context and, besides, it is an act with meaning because it is a fact expressed through systems of symbols. The same author, quoting Cassirer, affirms: “Not only does the symbol unveil meaning, but is also grants it”.6

Even if it is true that, in a symbolic perspective, it is difficult not to talk about symbols, we need to clarify that we do not try to make an inventory of said symbols, or to define a priori their meaning and state their cultural logic. The symbol is an important element within Symbolic Anthropology, but it is of little relevance if we deal with it as an isolated item.

Rather than talking about the symbols of education, we try to sketch a line of work by means of the idea of symbolism. Symbols in a separate or separable way do not have all the conceptual strength we find in symbolism. In his work El simbolismo en general, Sperber says: “Therefore, I suggest the notion of symbol be, at least provisionally, suppressed from the descriptive vocabulary of the symbolism theory, so that it is only considered as a culturally defined eventual object of description”.7

It is necessary to insist on the fact that, when this author calls the symbol a “culturally defined object”, he refers to the difficulties to build a universal “grammar” of symbols, because even if it is true they are present in the cultural life, they are of a particular nature: “The notion of symbol is not universal, but cultural, and it can be present or absent, differ from one culture to another and even within a given culture”.8

The idea of symbolism to which this work affiliates is the one proposed by Sperber himself, who affirms, when developing the idea of cognitive symbolism: “Because symbolism is cognitive, it is a learning device”.9 Education, like the rest of the social whole, is an entity in which the individual learns; in other words, culture is learnt through cognitive processes.

Stated in these terms, symbolism allows us to interpret that education fulfills different functions, but it basically pursues two main objectives: being a means for accessing the symbolic universe and being an end in itself. On the one hand, education searches the construction of symbolic devices in each of the individuals that participate in it and, on the other hand, it stands up as a system with its own purposes and structure.

From the educational establishment, people access knowledge, regulations, prohibitions, myths and social rituals, and when they share these actions they become participants of a school symbolic logic.

Education symbolizes a degree of cultural development, therefore, having access to it allows us, at the same time, to be objects of this education, that is, it puts people in the social possibility of reaching the top of a pyramid built by culture itself.

Education and culture have marched together through the anthropological field; cultural transcendence implies the action of education.

Education, its symbolism and the Mexican context

Similar to any other contemporary country, schooled education in Mexico plays an essential role in various senses; it is a classifying system of individual abilities, it contributes to the reproduction of social classes, it works as a container of manual labor, it legitimizes knowledge and a conception of science, it proposes a model of society, it proposes myths and secular ritual systems, it encourages new generations to come into contact with the symbols that give sense to concepts such as nation, country and community.

For a long time, education has been presented as an unquestionable fact, a right of children and an obligation of the parents, something necessary for individual and collective wellbeing. Consider the following fact: if a family or community group decided to provide no religious education to their children, to train them to practice no sports, or if an Indigenous group decided not to strengthen their tongue and culture, this would only generate certain isolated perplexity or criticism, but if the same group decided not to provide (school) education, the entire society would shake and try to find solutions to this problem. The State, the educational system, the Church and almost everybody would criticize this fact as an irresponsible action and a true offense to social progress.

From this very moment we find ourselves before a complex of sociocultural relationships and before a symbolic system strongly ingrained in the individuals that constitute society. Education is present in social expectation, the work marketplace and community ideology.

Even if it is true that all related to education may be interpreted as a symbolic system, this does not deny its profound material, political and ideological links with the culture of origin (in a broad sense). The Mexican society is regulated by clear and defined laws and regulations; men participate in this social dynamic and its designs.

Education and culture are intimately close entities. We might say that every cultural act implies an educational act, because the socialization of an individual implicitly conveys the learning of certain concepts. The Weltanschauung, symbolic systems, rituals, myths and every cultural practice need to be transmitted, taught and learned by the different generations that constitute a social group. Explicitly or implicitly, the participation in a cultural act requires processes of socialization, of teaching and learning. People participate in these acts and learn something from them.

Society shapes its culture and, at the same time, is shaped by it; in this process, we need a mechanism that allows the reproduction and socialization of myths, traditions, practices and ideas, and here is where the educational process emerges, first of all, overturning the totality of institutions, to then charge a certain administrative area with the development of said function. This is how school and, later on, the national educational systems appear. Regarding school and the Mexican system, Carlos Ornelas explains: “The Mexican educational system is a complex and uneven institutional cosmos, which is divided in modalities and levels, with sometimes contradictory purposes and practices that deny the explicit goals of education; all this is the result of a history of more than 70 years… ”10

As I said at the beginning of this article, education: a) is a symbolic representation of society as a whole; b) symbolizes the idea of social progress, the conception of science and scientific knowledge; c) symbolizes the official history of society; and d) symbolizes national unity.

a) Education is a representation of society as a whole. First of all, schooled education symbolizes society itself in its totality, because the actions, knowledge, behavior and laws that regulate educational performance are the same as those that regulate social life. School becomes a preliminary version of social life, where individuals are prepared to be social beings.

Being an educated person means being a constituent part of society, in the same way society implies a group of educated people; this is its end and purpose, though sometimes it is not totally fulfilled; in the end, it is its objective.

Education (school) symbolizes the idea of social progress. Whoever attends an educational institution thinks of it as the mechanism that will allow him/her to face the future through certain training that includes behavior standards, a set of knowledge and a certification system.11

The most conservative theories establish education as the adequate mechanism to achieve the so-called social ascent, but the socio-educational crisis has shown the weakness of this statement, because nowadays we find a large number of people who have undertaken university studies and who cannot find a place in the productive apparatus, in the same way there are people who interrupt their studies to embark on informal activities that provide them with a higher economic revenue. Under these circumstances, education and the economic/political system enter an empiric interrogation, but they still keep their symbolic value, because they both continue to think of the importance of education.

b) Education symbolizes a conception of science and scientific knowledge. On the other hand and very much related to the previous idea, school symbolizes an idea of science and knowledge. School is identified as an institution that combats fanaticisms and obscure ideas; in its classrooms we are taught not to believe in anything other than the products of the scientific method; all the knowledge that is instructed there has passed through that filter. Common sense, empirical knowledge and many other concepts of a traditional nature are left behind.

School is the bulwark of science and the methodological statement for the construction of knowledge. Science, method and knowledge are consecrated through educational plans and programs, and the students are instructed to think within those parameters, even at the risk of traditional knowledge, customs and oral tradition being destroyed or forgotten.

School is a space that consecrates the idea of science and scientific knowledge and, because of this, it becomes a symbol of knowledge, of its essence and its production.

c) Education symbolizes the official history of society. It also presents itself as the stage for the veneration of the symbols of national unity. By means of the civic calendar, society remembers its greatest epic struggles, the historical development of the country and the heroes that participated in these events. Even if it is true that this also happens in different areas of society, it is in school that the civic calendar regulates activities by means of a ritual system that is constantly implemented; in the same way, students learn a certain version of national history.

School cyclically reproduces the history of the nation and it makes the students, parents, teachers and the community around it, participate in it. In this way, school creates a reality that is expressed in a cyclic, constantly repeated time. The civic-ritual calendar organizes school life and presents itself as required knowledge for all students. In school, the cycle indicates the time that is devoted to learn through rituals and to remember founding myths.

In this sense, school satisfies two functions: a) it functions as stage to perform civic-rituals acts; proposes myths, dates and characters; offers a space chosen precisely for that purpose; guarantees audiences by demanding the involvement and respect from the part of the participants, and b) transforms the ritual system into knowledge; gives it a mandatory character; and in order to do this, it alludes to matters such as duty, civility, patriotism and moral.

These elements are evaluated as part of the programs of subjects such as Civics and History, and they are also reflected in aspects such as the students’ socialization skills or even in the evaluation of their behavior, under good manners’ grades; they work as constitutive elements of a social project of country and of categories such as homeland and nation. To reach this goal, education resorts to other symbols, perhaps the most evident ones within this panorama.

d) Education symbolizes national unity. One of the most identified functions of education is the one that refers to the diffusion and veneration of the symbols that have served to merge the different social groups that make up the country. The flag, the national anthem, the coat of arms and the Constitution, just to mention the most representative, are national symbols that find in school an ideal stage to re-create founding myths and to search for consolidation and identity.

By means of ceremonies, a civic calendar, songs, icons and mythical narrations, past and present are united and summon the participants to acknowledge themselves and their country. School is a privileged place for this kind of actions, because in it there is the necessary time to perform them and because it has the necessary spaces for their consecration.

In order for this process to make sense, it is necessary that the students re-build the symbols, and this is achieved through their participation in the ritual ceremonies – that are constantly developed- , sometimes as spectators and some others as direct participants. Participation in this ritual complex does not mean to re-invent the flag or to recompose the anthem; it means to re-conceptualize the symbol.

Participating in education is participating in culture and also re-conceptualizing the symbolic system through our involvement in concrete actions. Individuals and symbols find in school spaces the stage for the encounter of past and present.

Myths and rituals on the educational stage

Symbols in education require significant contexts, a coverage able to offer relationships and meaning to them. The mythical system and the ritual system work as contextual elements where the different symbols contained in education as a total system are created and charged with meaning.

In education, the existence of numerous symbols brings about complex mythical systems, which are presented in a superimposed way. The first set of symbols refers to national origin, to the indissoluble union between school and community, to the emancipating role of the educational action and to the supremacy and infallibility of scientific knowledge. The second set of symbols (rites), is expressed in ceremonies and ritualized practices in order to venerate knowledge exteriorized in books, plans and programs, initiation rituals to the scientific method, rites of passage contained at the beginning and at the end of each school cycle, and civic-ritual ceremonies that allow us to participate in society and become Mexican.

School may be understood as the space where ritualized practices are implemented and where both the myths related to the mastering of knowledge and those that constantly remind us of the origin of the nation and of mexicanity are permanently revived.

Because of this, school is validated and legitimized as an institutional space, which prevails over men and women, adults and children, teachers and students. And it is precisely the latter that cause the ritual to be fulfilled.

Within the school sphere, students and teachers play a main role in the life and development of ritual practices. However, those who are institutionally responsible for education are the teachers, not only as reproducers of a symbolic system, but also as historical participants in its construction.

Teachers, men, women and children participate in national culture and re-build the symbolic system of education as a way, only one among many others, to find the logic of Mexican society and –as already affirmed by Marie Odile Marion- to be in the possibility “to explain themselves”.

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1. Elsie Rockwell, The Everyday School, 1995, p. 8. [↩]
2. Ibidem, pp. 17-18. [↩]
3. Marie-Odile Marion (coord.), Antropología simbólica, 1995, p. 7. [↩]
4. Idem. [↩]
5. Joan- Carles Mélich, Antropología simbólica y acción educacional, 1996, p. 67. [↩]
6. Idem. [↩]
7. Dan Sperber, El simbolismo en general, 1978, p. 75. [↩]
8. Idem. [↩]
9. Ibidem., p.118. [↩]
10. Carlos Ornelas, El sistema educational nacional. La transición de fin de siglo, 1996, p.28. [↩]
11. Cf. Pierre Bordieu (1990 y 1997). [↩]