Catholicism in the educational discourse of Argentina: From the National Pedagogical Congress to the Federal Education Bill (1984-1993)

Abstract

In this paper we analyze discourse of the Argentinean Catholic Church on public education, specifically, its interdiscursive conformation in relation to other discourses in dispute. We articulate the notion of discourse as social practice and discursive facet of the construction of hegemony (Fairclough, 1992, 1995), with the primacy of interdiscourse (Maingueneau, 2008), the discursive formulation of memories (Courtine, 1981; Foucault, 2004, 2005), and the use of heteroglossic resources of dialogic contraction and expansion (Bajtín, 2011; Martin & White, 2005). A corpus of documents related to the definition of the educational field, focused on discussions of the National Pedagogical Congress held between 1986 and 1988 is analyzed. We identify, on the one hand, dialogical contraction strategies and recurrent topics of Catholic educational discourse in this discussion juncture, and, on the other hand, the return of such topics as part of a domain of memory in the definition of Federal Education Law of 1993 and its echoes in the current national educational legislation, highlighting the disputes, tensions and disposals of State discourse to the demands of the Catholic Church.