In this same month and year, sixty years ago, his new generation of preschool teachers (28) and Primary (55) graduated from the Urbana Normal School of La Paz, Baja California Sur, at seventeen years of having been founded by Governor Francisco J. Múgica, also a delegate of the Secretary of Public Education.
This inauguration was a synthesis of a series of achievements regarding teacher training institutions in BCS, which began on June 22, 1873 when the Lancasteriana Professional Sunday School for Young Ladies was founded in La Paz, fifty years after the first Lancasterian schools in the capital of the Republic.
This first attempt was followed by the Nocturnal Normal School (1913), the Mixed Regional Normal School (1917), the Regional Mixed Normal Course (1918), the Normal School of Teachers (1922), the Rural Normal School of La Paz (1931) , the Todos Santos Rural Normal School (1931), on the walls of whose building (today the Néstor Agúndez Martínez Cultural Center) the students and teachers left testimony, in paintings that are still preserved, of the notable influence that education produced on them. socialist.
And the San Ignacio Regional Rural Normal School (1936), immediate antecedent of the institution that now occupies us.
The graduation that is the reason for this note may be important only for those who formed that group of novice (with two exceptions) teachers, most of them with light eighteen years of age above.
However, perhaps it is worth highlighting the historical facts that it was the first class that worked within the Eleven Year Plan established in the six-year term of President Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), within which the National Commission of Books of Free text and the objectives of normal education were specified; among them: “strengthen appreciation for the teaching profession; achieve mastery of the methods and techniques of teaching work; promote loyalty to the historical, social and cultural values of the Mexican people; and promote the development of the democratic spirit … ”
The second fact is that this batch left the normalista classrooms with a job offer in a federal plaza, which contained the emigration – which was numerous – to the neighboring northern state of Baja California, undertaken with great enthusiasm at the same time. call of the South Californian Braulio Maldonado, its first governor (1953-1959), to occupy the chair in the new state educational system.
The generation of 1961 was made up, in general, by La Paz and diverse populations of the Californian territories of the south and the north, two educators in service and two boys who had fled from conflictive rural normals.
At the graduation ceremony, and as president of both groups of graduates, I had the opportunity to express the conviction that, due to the training acquired in this prestigious institution, we would have to perform well in the new responsibility of our lives, and that we would therefore go where our services are required:
“We are aware of the duty imposed on us by our role in the ranchería, the village, the ejido, etc., wherever our presence and activity are necessary …”
Governor Bonifacio Salinas Leal and his wife Altagracia Cantú (who contributed to the party with the performance of the mariachi Uruapan, assigned to the military zone also commanded by General Salinas himself, who was the last to hold both headquarters in this entity), and María Elena Chanes, director of Preschool Education in the Republic. Don Luis González’s orchestra contributed to the graduation dance.
In September of that same 1961 we were assigned to various entities in the country.
As I affirm in the book where I published (more than half a century later) the thesis Character education With which I obtained the title in that first trade, the initial work cycles (1961-1964) enriched me with experiences in contact with the people of the countryside, their haste, achievements, dreams, customs, speech and wit.
At the end of the reception exam, I received an invitation from Don Domingo Carballo – teacher of normalist generations from 1944 until his death in 1972 – to join my staff. Alma mater. Then another stage began that is a separate story.
Sixty years later, of the 1961 generation, half of its members still survive. So let us celebrate: We celebrate that it is so …
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