Editors who rebel: the school text La Frase by Victoriano Montes and the conflict of interest of Pablo Pizzurno (Buenos Aires, late 19th and early 20th century)

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the rejection of the school text La Frase de Victoriano Montes in the 1907 contest, whose jury was composed of inspectors Pablo Pizzurno, Gerardo Victorín and Raúl Díaz. On the one hand, the case revealed, on the one hand, a broader reality linked to the growing publishing interests that were connected with the space gained by public education and the literacy of the population. On the other hand, there were discussions inherent to diversified criteria whose basic origin was linked to the technical and pedagogical details of what a good reading text should be at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, our hypothesis sustains that technical factors and conflicts of interest were linked in the evaluation Commission in favor of actors who had been monopolizing the market under the protection of hegemonic publishers such as Ángel Estrada. We deployed a qualitative methodology by analyzing different documentary corpus, such as the magazine El Monitor de la Educación Común, reports to the CNE and documents of the 1897 and 1907 contests consulted in the National Intermediate Archive.