The Freinet schools in Mexico

Graciela González de Tapia, 1996

Together with others, José de Tapia introduced the Freinet techniques in Spain. Later, in exile, he and Graciela founded a school in Mexico that revolutionised the understanding of education. Graciela tells us about the development of the Freinet schools in Mexico.



From the magazine Kikiriki, No. 40

The first time I heard the name Celestin Freinet was in 1956, when a classmate of mine who was going to France left me some notebooks with children's prints and a copy of Herminio Almendros' book “La imprenta en la escuela” (The Printing Press at School) before she left. Anyone who has read this book knows how emotional education can be. Through its loving pages, I learnt that there was once a French country teacher of extraordinary empathy, who knew how to listen to his pupils, encourage them to express their ideas freely, and who developed a school philosophy based on openness, common sense and a great love and respect for children.

I read about the classroom and felt the contact with nature, I read about free texts and internalised freedom of speech, I looked at the drawings describing the printing sets, and this led to a way of being and doing that was different from what I was used to. Needless to say, I was very disturbed by this reading. Like hail on the roof, the concepts rattled my conscience and would no longer let me teach in peace. I felt the need and the obligation to change my methods, to impregnate myself with the spirit of Freinet, so that later, with the implementation of everything that my reading suggested to me, I could recognise a very special blossoming of my pupils. This blossoming was born of the greatest participation and the freest and most spontaneous creativity, which made them increasingly independent and at the same time increasingly responsible.

Who could have guessed at the time that the man who had inspired Almendros' book some twenty years earlier, a book that changed my professional work and my life, would become my husband: the teacher José de Tapia.

Tapia, who like Freinet was born in 1896, had completed his studies in Córdoba, his home-town, in 1913. In 1929, he became a teacher in Montoliú, a village of 500 inhabitants in Lleida, 8 kilometers from the capital. Like other teachers in the neighbouring villages, he was a man of one mind, who was very committed to his community and possessed an exceptional pedagogical talent.

Every fortnight or once a month, the colleagues met to see the local teacher at work and criticise his work. Once in Montoliú and then again in Pugiber, travelling through the villages where the members of the group worked. It will be understood that with this routine of improving teaching, one had no choice but to become a great teacher. In addition, all the teachers in the group held meetings after the critique and the meal in which they asked the villages to commit themselves to education.

Herminio Almendros was the school inspector of the region, and he appreciated the work of these teachers, especially that of José de Tapia. He had written the following in his visitor's book:

‘Here we have a school, a teacher, who is rightly involved in the educational work that our republic is doing. Perhaps I have never visited another school where the work goes hand in hand with the spirit of the times and the spirit of school renewal as well as in this school in Montoliú de Lérida. If all Spanish teachers had the same emotional sense of popular education and the clear vision that José de Tapia has of his responsibility for the destiny of the new generations, the work and destiny of the nascent Spain would reach the category of ‘exemplary’.

It is incomprehensible that the outstanding work of this school and the unique merit of this teacher were not recognised and explained earlier.

In front of this class – children and teachers who are enthusiastic about new school techniques, in co-operation with motivating activities – I must declare that I have seen a modest but true attempt at school renewal.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to Mr Tapia for his exemplary work as a teacher.

Montoliú, 5 December 1932’

Perhaps when Almendros brought a Freinet printing press from France to write a book about printing in school, he did not want to write about this technique without trying it out first. He asked Tapia to carry out some tests with the children to check the results. In this way, Tapia became the introducer of the Freinet technique in Spain, and he was fascinated by the experience because it aroused the children's interest and desire to participate and was a real motivation to print children's texts.

Naturally, Tapia made his group aware of the benefits of the technique, especially Patricio Redondo, the teacher from Pugiber, and soon they, together with Almendros, founded the Spanish Cooperative of the Freinet Technique to spread this new form of school expression throughout the Catalan region.

Years later, the Spanish Civil War put an end to the outbreak of this pedagogy in Spain. Spanish exile took them to Mexico, where the technique was further developed through the work of some of these hard-working teachers.

Tapia did not arrive in Mexico with the exiles of 1939, but first had to pass through the concentration camps of Argelès-sur-Mer, Barcarès and Saint-Cyprien. He then worked as a woodcutter and charcoal burner in the German zone and as a guerrilla fighter in the Resistance. At the end of the Second World War, France was liberated from the Nazis. Tapia returned to paid work.

– As a teacher? No, not at all: as a baker, porter and street sweeper.

Eventually he heard that Patricio Redondo, his great friend, had managed to settle in Mexico and found the Freinet Experimental School in San Andrés Tuxtla, in the state of Veracruz. The correspondence began, full of memories and nostalgia. In 1948, their letters crossed paths:

- Tapia, do you want to come to Mexico?

- Hey, Patricio, can I come to Mexico?

 

Patricio Redondo Moreno

  Arrest of Patricio Redondo, 11 July 1935 ¹

            

Patricio immediately set to work and soon managed to bring Tapia and two of his family members into the country as visitors, with the obligation to live with him, who in turn would answer to the Mexican government for the Tapia family. Only then was Tapia able to work with children again. He taught science subjects throughout the school and had the surroundings of the village as well as the flora and fauna of the Los Tuxtlas region at his disposal for his hiking lessons (clase paseo). He made plans with Patricio to expand the school and perhaps open a boarding school for children from the region. But none of this was possible. Difficulties of all kinds, especially financial ones, derailed the projects.

Soon afterwards, Tapia and his family decided to start a new life as immigrants. They decided to leave San Andrés Tuxtla and settle in Mexico City.

In 1955, Tapia met the anthropologists Ricardo and Isabel Pozas, who worked for the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Institute of Indigenous Affairs). The problem the Pozas faced was the Hispanisation of the Mazatec Indians of Temazcal using the institute's traditional methods: literacy in their own language and then Hispanisation. The difficulties were enormous, because the Mazatec language, like Chinese, is tonal. Depending on the tone in which it is pronounced, the meaning of the words changes; there are five different tones!

The institute decided to take a different approach with the Mazatecs, especially as they needed to be taught Spanish as quickly as possible. They had to be resettled from their home villages, as these would be flooded once work on the dam being built in the catchment area of the Papaloapan River was completed.

Tapia proposed the Freinet technique for direct literacy. As long as they could print their free texts, the young Mazatec children quickly learnt Spanish. They spent much of the day with the bilingual project staff, who acted as teachers under Tapia's guidance, asking for words and words and words so that they could express their own thoughts and experiences in Spanish and print them as well. In this way, Hispanisation was desired rather than forced. Once a boy wrote: ‘I am very sad because my father left home and abandoned my mother, my brothers and me’.

A few days later, the boy's father turned up at the school: ‘By what right,’ he asked Tapia, ‘is the school interfering in my private life like this?’

Tapia replied that the opposite was the case, that the boy was bringing his family and private life into the school through a text. They then talked about the boy's concerns and the fears he was expressing. Tapia convinced the father to take care of the children instead of being angry about school. They talked a lot and the father left the school calm and grateful. In time, Tapia learnt that things had changed in the house and that the father had even returned. What a load-bearing capacity a free text can have!

When the work on the Papaloapan River was completed, the villages were relocated outside the future reservoir and the sluices were closed. The Mazatec villages, including Pescaditos de Arriba and Pescaditos de Enmedio, were covered by the water. Some, like Soyaltepec, remained outside the dam and became islands. Their inhabitants returned there. Other Mazatec Indians were resettled far away on land that was not as good as the land they had lost.

The literacy project was cancelled, and Tapia was once again excluded from education. In 1959, his wife died just as they were about to visit the children they had left behind in France. A few months later, Tapia decided to go there alone and live with the children.

One year was enough for him to realise that he had lost nothing in France. For his children, with their families and their own problems, he was just another problem, as he could no longer find work in teaching. Any paid work was forbidden to him as he had already reached retirement age.

Tapia returned to Mexico in 1961. He went to the Ministry of Public Education and sought out his friends from the literacy project, who were in leading positions at the Ministry at the time. He said to them:

‘Now that my wife is dead and my children hardly need me, I wish with all my heart to be a teacher in the countryside again’

And he was allowed to do so. People remembered his work in Temazcal so fondly that they did not hesitate to put him in charge of primary education at a small school in the village of Santa Catarina Yecahuizotl in the district of Tláhuac. This belongs to the federal district of Mexico City but is quite far from the centre of Mexico City.

I worked with Tapia in this school, which was very deserted precisely because of its distance from the city centre and where the former teachers counted the time spent travelling to school as working time, so that instead of working with the children from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., they only managed to do so from 9 or 9.30 a.m. to 12 p.m. ‘in order to be back in the centre at dismissal time’.

Jose de Tapia Bujalance

Firstly, Tapia decided to live in the village so that he could be close to the children and their parents all day long. He was given a very modest room and lived with the same shortcomings as the farmers, but he managed to revitalise the school. To catch up with the children, he worked with them in the mornings and volunteered in the afternoons so that the school was open all day for children who wanted to attend and learn.

My Freinet printing press arrived at the small school in Santa Catarina, as well as various reading materials, some for plastic arts. We had a plot of land of about one hectare, and instead of a cooperative, we organised the children as an association of young farmers. The work was good, the children were very well developed, parents, children and teachers were happy. But the Directorate of Primary Education decided that our work project was too good to be so far from the centre and we were transferred to a city school. Transfers and problems, absurd bureaucratic burdens, my imminent departure to France, Tapia's desire to return to the Latinos, temporarily prevented us from our pedagogical work.

By this time, Tapia and I had already got married. Perhaps the affection we shared was also part of the love we both felt for the school.

 

Chela González de Tapia

From October 1962 to June 1963, I had the opportunity to visit the school in Vence on a scholarship from the French government to train as a French teacher abroad. I was able to make contact with the Freinets and complete a 15-day work placement with them. I was also able to attend the Niort Congress and make many other contacts with teachers and Freinet classes in Paris and in the province, which gave me a great deal of motivation. Back in Mexico, I took stock of my Freinet work in the public school, completely isolated and lost in a sea of bureaucracy, before I met Tapia. With a thousand ideas in my head, based on what I had seen and experienced in France, I suggested to my husband that we set up a small private, non-profit, secular school where we could use the technique with greater freedom.

This is how ‘Manuel Bartolomé Cossío’ came into being, where Freinet techniques have been practised and disseminated since 1964. The first 10 years were very active. We took part in countless conferences, round tables, courses and workshops and used every opportunity we had to explain the philosophy and practice of the techniques.

We established contacts with schools that already existed in Mexico City, such as the ‘Escuela Activa’ and the ‘Cipactli’ school, which changed their procedures to adapt to the techniques. Other schools were founded, one with the name ‘Patricio Redondo’ when he had already died, and another that dared to use the name ‘Celestin Freinet’ when he was still alive.

They were all, like Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, small, private, non-profit and secular schools that had emerged from the Freinet philosophy, but some of them with their own characteristics that separated them from our ideals.

It was a time when Freinet techniques were widespread and fashionable, but schools do not work because of fashions or theories, nor in the hands of inexperienced psychologists or others who are equally incompetent. Rather, it needs committed teachers who love their profession and are willing to devote themselves fully to building a school.

Some of these schools failed and disappeared. Others were founded, such as the ‘Ermilo Abreu Gómez’, founded by Ramón Costa Jou, a Spanish refugee who belonged to the Cooperativa Española de la Técnica Freinet during the Republic, or the ‘Teceltican’, the last Freinet school, which was founded in Mexico City in 1982 under the direction of Toña Linares. She worked with Tapia and me at the Manuel Bartolomé Cossío school for 13 years.

To this day, the Freinet schools that continue to work according to the path taken many years ago are those of Ramón Costa Jou, the ‘Escuela Activa’, Toña Linares' ‘Teceltican‘ and the ‘Manuel Bartolomé Cossío‘, which José de Tapia and I founded and which is the oldest school in Mexico City.

Freinet schools were also founded in the province of Mexico: the ‘Tlamacaxqui‘ Freinet School in Baja California, the Freinet School in Cuernavaca, Morelos, the ‘Prometeo‘ Freinet School in Puebla, the Freinet School in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas and the Freinet School in Jalapa, Veracruz are some of them, although not all as successful as the ‘Freinet Experimental School‘ in San Andrés Tuxtla, which has now been in existence for over 50 years.

Some time ago, I was invited by Professor Fernando Jiménez Mier y Terán, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, to collaborate on a series of anthologies on education to be published by the Ministry of Public Education.

I gladly accepted because it was a wonderful opportunity to spread the word about our beloved techniques. I used material from two books, one by Elisa Freinet and the other by Herminio Almendros, who had sensitised me so much thirty years earlier that I dedicated my professional life to the Freinet technique. I collected and organised the materials that were published under the title ‘Cómo dar la palabra al niño’ (How to give the word to the child). Fernando Jiménez himself published material by Celestín Freinet from ‘Les dits de Mathieu’ (The Sayings of Mathieu) in another anthology entitled ‘A Pedagogy of Common Sense’.

These little books, which were widely used by public school teachers, were back in service.

Many people came to me to learn more about the technique after reading ‘How to Give the Word to the Child’. Among them was a small group of hard-working teachers who work in very poor public schools on the outskirts of Mexico City, in marginalised areas with myriad problems. These young teachers, who came together to form the Modern School Movement of Mexico after reading and discussing the above-mentioned books, have worked hard to spread the Freinet technique through courses, workshops, exhibitions and their personal work in the classroom. They did exemplary work under very difficult conditions: A lack of understanding on the part of the authorities, envy and mistrust on the part of colleagues who did not join the movement, and minimal material resources.

‘The children are happy and they enjoy learning. Their education is more solid and their self-esteem is growing. That's our satisfaction,’ say the teachers of the M.M.E.M. [Movimiento Mexicano para la Escuela Moderna], who are always ready to overcome all adversity and further consolidate the movement.

Around 1968, a handful of schools with similar criteria gathered for what we pompously called the 1^st National Congress of Active Schools. We called it ‘national’ because the Freinet Experimental School in San Andrés Tuxtla, which is not only in the province but was also the host school, took part. The congress was held every two years and we realised that we had grown a little more, always as small private, secular and non-profit schools. For the fifth or sixth congress, we had the opportunity to set up in a real congress hall in the medical centre of the Mexican Social Security Institute and invite teachers from public schools. The results were not outstanding.

While some were really interested in this new educational approach, others were rather reluctant to share their experiences and preferred to attack the speakers irrationally during the presentation of their work or during the plenary sessions. They were particularly annoyed that we were working at private schools. They argued not from a pedagogical but from a political point of view, accusing us of everything being easy and nice for us because our pupils were not malnourished.

 

José de Tapia at the school of Manuel Bartolomé Cossío

In the end, the congresses were disorganised and everyone continued to work on their own. More or less 15 years later, the schools that had managed to survive, with nostalgia breathing down their necks, decided to meet up again. We wanted to share our new experiences, but above all we wanted to see each other again, all a little older. We met at our school, Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, and from then on our meeting was called ‘Reunion of Schools that are friends with each other’.

From this meeting, which took place in 1992, we formed a network of alternative schools, also of a national character, which initially met every six months and now meets annually and continues to grow.

In February 1996, the VII. National Meeting of Alternative Schools will take place, and as part of the activities, a space will be dedicated to the two centenaries, that of Tapia and that of Freinet. The venue will once again be the Bartolomé Cossío, and we are already preparing with great enthusiasm and an enormous desire to continue spreading these techniques and methods, which are part of the philosophy of the modern school and give us the character of alternative schools.

Source: https://www.mepamexico.org/search?q=graciela+de+tapia

Translated with DeepL.com (free version) & Andi Honegger

Added by the translator:

In 2007 the ‘Movimiento por una Educación Popular Alternativa MEPA’ (Movement for an Alternative Popular Education) was created, which in 2008 organised the RIDEF in Metepec, Puebla.

1 Arrest of a teacher

At five o'clock the day before yesterday afternoon, the sergeant of the Civil Guard, Don Aurelio Cespedes, accompanied by several soldiers of the said corps, carried out a search in the house of Don Patricio Redondo, director of the school of Villanuev ay Geltru, following an order from his superiors. A loaded pistol without a licence and several cartridges were found. Proclamations and leaflets of an extremist nature were also found, as well as various containers of liquids, the contents of which are currently unknown. Mr Redondo was arrested.