Processes and tensions of democratization of an aesthetic education in Argentina: the “Revista de Educación” between 1960-1970

Abstract

This article analyzes discourses produced about bodies and sensitivities in a cultural device of massive incidence that circulated in the schooling processes, and had aesthetic and political meanings in Argentina in the second half of the 20th century. Assuming that school aesthetics is a constitutive dimension of training of collective sensibilities, and therefore seeks to reorder feelings, assessments and moralities in certain sensibilities, produce a “sentimental education”, and we are interested in analyze the Revista de Educación, edited by the Ministry of Education of Buenos Aires province in the 1960s and 1970s. In that moment, under discussion, there was a tense struggle of two constant processes, antagonists and mutual contestation: a trend to democratization and another of conservative restriction. Both currents disputed around the significant “modernization”, trying to articulate that emptiness significant with different notions to dominate the discourse field. The second half of the twentieth century has been marked by the cultural debate that was touched by the questioning of social rituals, modes of parenting, intergenerational links, framed in the proliferation of media and languages, typical of the expansion of mass society. These phenomena had a direct impact on the crisis of the traditional educational format, the expansion of cultural transmission media and languages, and the demand for the renewal of contents and the means for the affiliation that education produces.