Abstract

"Business Strategies in the Field of Education in Development Argentina (1943-1973): Factory-schools, Management and Financing of State Education"

Hernando Javier Arbelo, University of Buenos Aires (hernandoarbelo@gmail.com)

The historiographic studies on businessmen and companies of the last decades have revalued the study of specific cases to analyze, among others, the relations between employers and workers in the manufacturing space, the forms of extra-economic domination and the workers' resistance. They have also proposed to observe businessmen as a lobby and lobby group in their relations with the State. In these new perspectives, however, little has been studied in the field of relations between entrepreneurs and education despite the close relationship that has been, especially since the intensification of the industrialization process in Argentina registered since the 1930s. In reality, businessmen deployed various strategies in the educational field since even before that period. The main problem was the provision of skilled labor, mainly operators and technicians, for the growing industry and the inability of the technical education offered by the State to solve it. However, there were background ideological and political issues that encouraged such initiatives. In this work we present, analyze and systematize these strategies and some of their results. They varied in the decades under study since the creation of educational establishments in the workshops and factories, many of them created by leading companies in the metallurgical field that we study here, to the management and financing of technical education from the creation of specific organizations such as the National Commission for Learning and Vocational Guidance (CNAOP) and the National Council for Technical Education (CONET). For this exercise we use sources little used in previous works, such as those produced by these organizations and others that were shaping the developmental policies implemented by governments in that period. In this way, we intend to shed light on another of the ways in which businessmen related, not without tensions and conflicts, to the State and the workers.