page_title: Lázaro Cárdenas
section_title: Education
hierarchical_section_title: Lázaro Cárdenas / Presidency, 1934–1940 / Education
caption_attribution_description: English: General Lázaro Cárdenas del Río
context_page_description: Lázaro Cárdenas del Río was a general in the Constitutionalist Army during the Mexican Revolution and a statesman who served as President of Mexico between 1934 and 1940. He is best known for nationalization of the oil industry in 1938 and the creation of Pemex, the government oil company. He also revived agrarian reform in Mexico, expropriating large landed estates and distributing land to small holders in collective holdings.
  Although he was not from the state of Sonora, whose generals had dominated Mexican politics in the 1920s, Cárdenas was loyal to Sonoran general and former president Plutarco Elías Calles. Calles had founded the National Revolutionary Party in the wake of the assassination of Sonoran general Alvaro Obregón, who served as president and was president-elect in 1928. Cárdenas was Calles's hand-picked candidate in 1934 to run for the presidency. While Calles did not hold the title of president, he had remained the power behind the presidency, and expected to maintain that role when Cárdenas took office.
context_section_description: During the Calles Maximato, Mexican education policies were directed at curtailing the cultural influence of the Catholic Church by introducing sex education and leftist ideology via socialist education, and generally aiming to create a national civic culture.  Cárdenas as a presidential candidate, under the patronage of fierce anticlerical Calles, was in favor of such policies.  The opposition to socialist education by the Catholic Church as an institution and rural Catholics in such strongholds as Michoacan, Jalisco, and Durango saw the revival of armed peasant opposition, sometimes known as the Second Cristiada.  The extent of the opposition was significant and Cárdenas chose to step back from implementing the radical educational policies, particularly as he became engaged with undermining Calles's power.  Cárdenas gained support from the Catholic Church when he distanced himself from anticlerical policies.
  An important addition to higher education in Mexico was when Cárdenas established a technical university in Mexico City, in the wake of the 1938 oil expropriation.  The Instituto Politécnico Nacional was created train engineers and scientists.
caption: General Lázaro Cárdenas del Río.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "1200", "Image YResolution": "1200", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:10:01 20:16:14", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5027", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2566", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3680"}