State Agencies, sugar entrepreneurs and educational institutions: the School of Arboriculture from Tucumán and the speech concerning the agricultural modernization, 1870-1920

Abstract

This presentation analyzes the discursive constructions concerning the agricultural modernization elaborated by the state agencies and by the productive factors from Tucumán. The sense of this first approximation, it is to examine the role granted to the School of Arboriculture in the promotion of a most rational exploitation of the soil. The question of the agricultural education turns out to be linked to two big topics: first to the educational policies designed by the central government, which was necessary the concurrence of the provincial States, and in the second term to the consolidation of an economy based in exportations as dynamic engine of the Argentine growth with center undiscussed in the pampeana region. Thus, the projects of creation of educational establishments destined for the formation of " educated farmers " it constituted, at least in the field of the rhetoric, one of the fundamental worries so much of the public power, (national and provincial) as of social relevant actors. In this respect, the question of the creation and functioning of the experimental schools must be approached in the frame of the political project of the Generation of 80 ' and of the process of construction of the National State.The study of this educational establishment receives special relevancy becouset between the foundation and the effective function of the School passed thirty years. This course realizes, to a great extent of the policies concerning the agricultural education implemented from the state agencies, and the difficulties that experienced the public power to delimit the profile that was seeking to stamp itself on the institution, which the disagreements were reflecting to near the brands that had to assume the School. These differences crystallized in the debates in the local press concerning the agricultural modernization, the education and the sugar specialization.