This article rescues a series of texts produced by schoolteachers between 1820 and 1890 in order to comply with the ruling educational authority's request for the elaboration of reports on their institutions. These documents are located in the General Public Instruction collection of the Archivo Historico del Distrito Federal. The schoolteachers' narrations are analysed from the perspective of their conceptual frameworks and structures of rationality. Through the narrations of the schoolteachers, written in their reports to the authorities, we can trace the emergence from practical experience of a collection of knowledges that reveal the conceptual frameworks and the structures of rationality that enable us to understand early schooling in Mexico. The article argues that the practical knowledge concerning the state of schooling contained in these texts constitutes the beginnings of a mode of conceptualizing educational processes that differs in nature to that which was developed by the pedagogical sciences, and that is directly linked to strategies of governance. (Contains 4 figures and 41 footnotes.)