Catholic Church and educative laicity in Argentina: from Federal Law of Education to National Education Law

Abstract

The current normative configuration of the Argentine educational system can be interpreted, in terms of educational laicity, as the sedimentation of a political culture generated in a history of tensions, disputes and recognitions between the State and the Catholic Church. In this framework, the aim of this paper is to analyze the positioning of the Catholic Church before the discussion and sanction of the National Education Law (LEN) sanctioned in 2006, after thirteen years of the Federal Law of Education (LFE). In order to follow the continuities and changes in the transition between both regulations, a reading of documents of the Argentine Church as well as of the educational press edited by the Superior Council of Catholic Education was made. The reading of the interdiscursive strategies put into play makes it possible to account for tensions and disputes over the senses of the State, public education and the place of religion in the national educational system. While the State discourse embodied in the LEN was permeable to the inclusion of Catholic educational precepts also present in the LFE, it also operated in line with a distancing from the Catholic ideology by including new topics that had been suppressed from the official discursive order. The normative space of public education was thus reconfigured from a new polyphony that took some of the Catholic demands crystallized over the years, but also incorporated new demands of a new cultural climate.