This paper is a review of the first stage of the project on the Social History of the Teaching of Reading and Writing in Argentina (HISTELEA), carried out by the Social History of Education research group at the National University of Luján. The category 'reading scenes', defined as the place where writing is realized/materialized as a social practice in the transmission of knowledge, is applied in three projects that represent paradigmatic models of Argentina: the agricultural export model, the Welfare State model, and the neoliberal model, with their corresponding political culture and subject formation practices. The chronological framework is dictated as follows: (1) the 'normal' reading scene in the foundational education system (end of the nneteenth century); (2) the 'transgressive' reading scene during the first Peronist administration (middle of the twentieth century) ; (3) the 'anomic' reading scene in a country in the midst of a crisis (end of the twentieth century to date). The teachers' statement that 'they read anything', common at the turn of the twentieth century under the rule of the written word, gave way to 'they don't read anything' during the second half of the century with the triumph of television, and was finally substituted by 'they don't know how to read' at the turn of the twenty-first century with the dawn of the new Internet reading scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]