This book is an excellent reference work for broad audiences and Latin Americanist scholars alike. Sixty-eight entries illustrate the impressive development of the history of education in Argentina and provide a conceptual toolbox and roadmap for specialists across Latin America. Contributing authors examine various aspects of the history of elementary and secondary education, in entries ranging from the mainly descriptive to the predominantly theoretical, all of them accompanied by brief bibliographies. As the editors acknowledge, this book represents an original initiative inspired by equivalent works in the social sciences. Taking an indispensably interdisciplinary approach, contributing authors share a concern over historicising educational ideas, events, artifacts and processes. In doing so, they challenge the tendency to naturalise educational phenomena still common in Latin American societies.

A book like this is possible because of the notable expansion of the history of education as a field of scholarly inquiry in Argentina. In his entry on the subject, Nicolás Arata summarises the genealogy of the field, identifying four consecutive approaches that have come to overlap in the present. Early works on educational institutions appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century, often with a celebratory or combative tone. Over time, this institutional approach has evolved toward presenting pluralistic memories of Argentine education. The first syntheses appeared in the first half of the twentieth century, generally focusing on the evolution of school systems, prominent educators and educational ‘milestones’. In the second half of the twentieth century, new interpretive paradigms and a growing autonomy from narratives produced by government agents contributed to the emergence of the history of education as a distinctive field. Since the 1980s, the creation of chairs in the history of education at different universities, the opening of research programmes on the subject and the establishment of the Argentine Society of the History of Education (1995) have furthered strengthened the discipline.

While the entries in this book provide a potential guide for scholars of the history of education in other Latin American countries, they also highlight some singularities of the Argentine case. In his entry on literacy, Roy Hora mentions that Argentina had the highest literacy rate in the region by the late 1860s. Various entries examine Law 1420, which established a public system of compulsory, free and secular elementary education in Buenos Aires province and the territories directly administered by the Federal government. Other provinces followed suit passing similar legislation, making Argentina one of the first Latin American countries to have such a system. In her entry, Beatriz Díaz analyses the early debates between federal and provincial authorities on school statistics. Once again, the Argentine government was one of the first in the region to carry out a national school survey, from 1883 to 1884. This comprehensive statistical instrument compiled information on infrastructure, teachers and students, and provided a ‘scientific’ basis to address existing problems.

I would like to highlight three of the many entries that can provide reference points for equivalent work on other Latin American countries. The first is the entry on the secularisation of public education, by Laura Graciela Rodríguez (pp. 211–14). Law 1420 mandated that ‘religious education may only be given in public schools by authorised ministers of the different faiths, to the children who practise their respective creed, outside regular school hours’. There was immediate opposition to the law, and occasional reversals over time, but it secularised public education in more than half of the national territory. In other provinces, authorities have oscillated between mandating the teaching of religion during school hours, outside of school hours, or neither. The second entry, by Eduardo Galak, is on the evolving relationship between schooling and the body in the Argentine case (pp. 65–9). He persuasively argues that all pedagogical discourses and practices have explicit or implicit repercussions on the bodies of those involved in the educational process. Lastly, in the entry on multilateral organisations, Jason Beech deftly summarises the shifting educational paradigms promoted in Argentina by institutions like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (pp. 249–51).

To summarise, this is a valuable reference work, geared toward general readers and scholars. The interdisciplinary perspective, and the historical awareness that informs all entries, enhance its originality.