Workers, citizens and scholars. Approach to the Democratic Syllabary of the Chilean Teachers Union (1943)

Abstract

In the last three months of 1943, a technical committee composed of leaders of the Chilean Teachers' Union (UPCH) together with writers and artists created the Silabario Democrático, which was finally put into circulation in 1944. The aim of this paper is to approach the contents of the Silabario first by succinctly reconstructing its context of production and then developing a general reading of its contents, divided into its four sections. We argue that although the text proposes as an immediate task to contribute to the eradication of illiteracy, it also had as a tacit objective to promote the identification of the reader/student with a class (the working class) and with a national identity (being Chilean) both united by their own interpretation of national history where the governments of the Popular Front were considered as the peak of democratic possibilities. Methodologically, the Silabario Democrático was used as raw material to carry out a content analysis, for the contextual reconstruction, documents of UPCH conventions were used, as well as newspapers of national circulation such as El Siglo, La Nación and the UPCH newspaper, Unidad.