he linked Francia’s colonial education with his posterior autocracy in pathological terms. Ramos Mejía claimed that Francia’s pathological character had had deep roots in his complexion and early education, but the education he had received at the University of Cordoba in today’s Argentina definitely reinforced his pathological tendencies. For Ramos Mejía, a “defective intellectual education” was an influence in producing “his extraordinary anomalies”. For instance, he compared the experience of being exposed to four years of theological studies to that of a tumor spreading in a healthy body.54 Lastly, the very content of that scholastic education was like “falling into troubled waters where the old Aristotelian ideas that circulated were confounded by the barbaric comments of the Arabs”.55 “This life of eternal intellectual masturbation had to be therefore necessarily harmful, that constant roaming of his mind oppressed by the shackles that tied him to the vague system of the Peripatetic school or to the old, moth-eaten parchment venerated during the excessive ecstasies in which those colonial scholars failed.”56 Even if historiographical preferences changed from classic liberal to more positivistic and scientific views, colonial education proved a very productive theme for grappling with uncomfortable post-colonial realities.
Liberal historical accounts of colonial culture and education consistently devalued the main traits of colonial education.57 Only very seldom were ←35 | 36→references to “colonial education” not outright negative, for instance its characterization as “fraternal” in a History of Uruguay.58 It was probably also the work of historians, now as authors of textbooks for schools, that propagated the popularity of colonial education as leitmotiv for explaining post-colonial developments and brought this argument to the revolting students quoted at the beginning of this text. With the expansion of primary and secondary education at the end of the nineteenth century some textbooks repeating the pattern of meaning conveyed the message to larger groups of the population. Introducing a textbook for primary and secondary schools in Guatemala, one anonymous author declared plainly: “I believe that the evils that affect Hispanic-American societies are the result of the poor colonial education whose atavism is still a heavy burden for us. To point out the defects of that education, to instill the youth with the conscious of them in the classrooms, to show them that intellectual laziness is overwhelming us and that the lack of ideals condemns us to be a people without energies is to advance the work of diffusion aimed at a better destiny.”59
On the whole, “colonial education” became a quite effective means of legitimating one’s position in the political arena in the post-colonial setting, and even was invoked to justify plans for “colonization” of the land in the work of some advocates of free market and “re-education” through transformation of the population by immigration. Lastly, it also acted as a historiographical recurrent motive in the major task of attaching meanings to the past, colonial and post-colonial.
Outlook: ‘Colonial Education’ and the construction of legitimacy in decolonization settings
A preliminary assessment of the discourse about ‘colonial education’ should take into account the widespread presence of this motive in political, scholarly and – probably – educational settings. There is no doubt that this reference suited the ideological needs of the elites of the fragile polities of early post-independence Latin America very well. They looked back to the colonial past and considered that the central problems of their polities were the outcome of deep, historical causation. They partly indulged in their political judgements by considering ←36 | 37→the heavy inheritance of the habits produced by colonial education. Realities in Latin America, even in the early twentieth century, may not have been rosy and hopeful. The legitimacy of independence, republicanism and democracy was by no means affected by these disappointments. In this sense, colonial education as a discourse of seemingly consistent contours and functions, embraced equally by liberals, conservatives and later socialists, constituted a convenient resource for facing difficult realities.
In this sense, Latin American decolonization inaugurated a pattern of argument, in which the legitimacy of new political orders was strongly construed on the basis of historical insights. In cases, in which legitimacy is contested or fragile, actors may look for an ‘outside’ from which they borrow arguments that lend them additional meanings for constructing legitimacy. This operation, called externalization in the sociology of knowledge,60 may refer to many sources. Actors may hint to experiences in other, more ‘advanced’ countries; they may refer to science or moral principles as well; or they may refer to history. Interestingly enough, decolonization processes favored a pattern of externalization in which references to the past, or to history gained a very significant place. Whether this constant referencing to the colonial past is a gain or a trap has worried several authors and intellectuals since independence. Yet the particular setting of decolonizing political and educational regimes in Latin America seems to have favored a strong historicizing gaze that eventually reached schools and became one of the elements in Latin American common sense discourses that definitely surfaced during the commemoration of the 500 years of the ‘discovery’ of the continent in 1992.
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