El aprovechamiento en colegios e institutos literarios en México, 1824-1867

This article reviews the meanings and school and social functions that secondary and higher education teachers and professors in Mexico attributed to the concept of achievement to assess the transmission of knowledge, from 1824 to 1867. This issue is important because it shows the formation of a school culture which gave rise to current educational evaluation. To this end, a thorough analysis of the press is carried out, and the meanings, uses and changes over time are reviewed. It is concluded that, although the use “achievement” served as a criterion to qualify the transmission of knowledge, since it was related to the processes of serialization of the studies with the dilemma about the number of advantaged students and other internal processes of the institutions, in practice the rhetoric about its social function was more important, since it accounted for the ways of insertion of students in the educational institutions and, chiefly, in the hierarchical society of the time.