Heterogeneity of diagnoses and diagnoses of heterogeneity. Weak children in the Argentinean educational system, 1900-1910

Abstract

This article analyses the process of constructing meanings around the notions of diagnosis and disability in the context of the Argentinean educational system in the first decade of the twentieth century. To do so, it examines a periodical publication, El Monitor de la Educación Común, the official organ of the National Education Council. It reconstructs the passage from the awakening of a certain sensitivity for childhood at the beginning of the century to the feverish search for diagnoses and classifications of weak children in the last years of that decade. It is characterized as a process plagued by doubts and hesitations aimed at detecting problems associated with children’s heterogeneity in order to transform the functioning of the system and achieve its objectives of covering the whole of society.