Conference Agenda

The thesis of this article is that the school in Chile in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries was central to the prevention of dangers related to hygiene, the degeneration of the race, and the promotion of certain types of moral habits. In this context, the concern to establish in Chile an educational system that would constitute a tool to improve the deplorable living conditions of the late 19^thcentury was considered “a national problem” (Salas, 1914/1967). Thus, the thesis of this analysis is that the school has been an important vector for the deployment of security mechanisms that address issues as diverse as the prevention of diseases, family and student habits, corporal discipline, and moral formation. In other words, the school has been a platform for the governmental construction of a kind of “moral topographies”, in search of “dangerous and endangered populations”, the disciplinary technology of the school being a tactic of moral management (Hunter, 1996, p. 143).

However, this problem was not exclusive to the Chilean case, and on the contrary, the reception of a series of ideas coming from Europe played a central role. With the sanitary movement that took place in the late 1830s in countries such as England, France and Spain, public health policies took on unprecedented importance, addressing not only technical issues such as sewerage and water infrastructure, but also seeking social stability, moralisation of the working classes, and economic efficiency (Ramos, 2014). In the transition to the 20^th century, this sanitary revolution arrived in Chile, a period in which hygiene, the theory of degeneration and eugenics were theoretical perspectives that constituted the foundations for addressing the so-called “social question”, a historical process that graphs social transformations product of accelerated modernisation, industrialisation and urbanization (Durán, 2014; Vetö, 2014; Becerra, 2018). From this process, hygiene began to be seen as a social and security problem related to issues such as mortality, disease, and contagion, and also, to the prevention of “social diseases”, the propagation of good customs, and the prosperity of the nation.

From a theoretical perspective, this study is interested in the analysis of how power has been exercised throughout history, process that has been introduced by Foucault (2009b) as “governmentality” in response to what he saw as the insufficiency of theoretical tools to analyse the exercise of power according to modern rationalities in Western societies. Governmentality has been described as a set of institutions, procedures, analyses, reflections, calculations, and tactics that enable the exercise of power, whose main object is the population, its form, the political economy, and its technical instrument, the security dispositif (Castro, 2018). In this framework, the concept of security dispositive is even more important, since according to the analytical proposal presented here, school institutions could be considered as part of their strategic purposes. In this sense, security dispositif is described as the mechanism of government that deals with possible and probable events in the future, assesses the cost through comparative calculations and establishes a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited (Foucault, 2009b) prescribing an optimal mean within a bandwidth of tolerable variation (Gordon, 1991).

According to the above historical and theoretical background, this research is interested in to analyse the experience of security in the Chilean school in the transition to the 20^th century, which is explored through the articulation of three axes: the axis of truth (knowledge), the axis of power (regulations) and the axis of subjectivity (relationship of the subject with him/herself and with others), whose interconnections is posed as a mechanism and organisational method to account for historical experiences.

Nowadays, diversity in education and upbringing is associated with such phenomena as language, religion, culture, gender. At the state level, laws on the above-mentioned phenomena are adopted and protected, and after being approved, they enter into circulation in educational programs, school standards.

The study of the history of world pedagogical thought shows that there have been examples of diversity in education since the 15th century, for example, after the spread of Protestantism in Europe, great attention was paid to the development of the national language and culture. The catechism was translated into different languages: French, German, Italian. Luther was a leader of that movement. Another example of diversity is making education accessible to all social strata of society. There was no discrimination. Later, the idea that girls and boys should study together in the same class began to circulate. Parallel to all this was the separation of the secular and the spiritual. Schools fall out of Church patronage, but communication with religion continues to be emphasized by state administrators.

Given that the phenomena of education and training have undergone changes over time due to continuous reforms of economy, politics, religion, language, culture, human history, there is a need to review and reevaluate all the words and concepts that form a new worldview. One such concept is the word diversity.

Today, education theorists, theologians, philosophers, education policymakers talk about having a diverse, inclusive society. A society where everyone is welcome. Various approaches are drawn up by experts, which will contribute to forming such a society. Diversity is a cross-sectoral phenomenon. That is, only in the context of legal, legislative, sociological, linguistic, historical discourses can one "build" a healthy, diverse, inclusive society. Therefore, results can be achieved as a result of the dialogue of specialists in the above-mentioned fields.

It is interesting to study the history of the word diversity in the context of education and upbringing, to see the interpretation of the word in different periods. Accordingly, to compare past and present perceptions of the concept of diversity, analyze them, understand what changes the word has undergone, reflect on the past and present and "build" the ideal diverse environment that will be most suitable for education and upbringing.

It is noteworthy that the present is based on the past, and the future is a combination of both. Based on this, it is necessary to understand what kind of content was, is and will be in the future under the concept of diversity.

Within the framework of our study, we paid attention to the interpretation of the word in the context of classic languages, and compared it with each other.

We tried to find interpretations of language, religion, especially in Christianity, the word diversity in the works of foreign and Armenian authors. Analyze past models of diversity, their features, find out their applicability in the present.

It is noteworthy that the present is based on the past, and the future is a combination of both. Based on this, it is necessary to understand what kind of content was, is and will be in the future under the concept of diversity.

Summarizing the above examples, it can be said that in the past diversity, although not fixed by law, led to the creation and development of the national language and culture, organizing joint teaching with different genders. Today, the importance of diversity is fixed and emphasized by laws, but in practice we are witnessing the weakening of national languages and cultures, the overestimation or underestimation of genders.

How can past approaches to diversity be valued and reformulated in today's education system?

The popular narratives in the history of education in India regard the educational initiatives and experiments (popularly called ‘Nai Talim’/ ‘Basic Education’) of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948) as the original, indigenous, and radical alternative to the colonial education which was ‘imposed’ by the British on Indian masses (Rao 2020, pp. 43-44). This educational experiment became significant during the anti-colonial sentiments of the early twentieth century, as the curriculum was designed deliberately along nationalist lines. Since the ‘manual work’ has been the significant basis of Gandhi’s Nai Talim, the apparent similarity between John Dewey’s philosophy of education and Gandhi’s educational thoughts has been explored by many educationists (Sadgopal 2019, Kumar 2008, Link 1962). However, during the nationalist movement, in the first half of the twentieth century, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891 – 1956) also started several educational initiatives of his own, which are lesser known compared to Gandhi’s experiment. Ambedkar is known for advocating the basic human rights of the oppressed in Indian society, which constituted women, Dalits (ex-untouchables), and backward castes. He was also a student of Dewey at Columbia University and hence was under the direct influence of Dewey’s educational thoughts and philosophy. Despite being closely associated with Dewey during his formal years, there is no exploration of the domestication of Dewey’s educational ideas in the educational thoughts and initiatives of Ambedkar in India. This paper focuses on this strand of transnational connection. Further, the paper also compares the extent of influence of Dewey’s philosophy of education on the educational thoughts of Gandhi and Ambedkar, two important Indian actors who shaped and influenced the educational landscape in colonial and postcolonial India.

The Deweyan conceptual and theoretical framework of democracy and education will be used in the exploration of these questions. This framework is significant because of the diverse nature of Indian society with traditional inequalities along the different axes such as caste, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity, and also the history of systematic discrimination against these marginalised groups in the area of education. This context is similar to the historical context of a diverse society due to industrialisation and migration, in which Dewey developed his philosophy of education.