ed. Arsen Djurovic and Eva Matthes (Bad Heilbrunn/Obb.: Klinkhardt, 2010).
11 Tan Yao Sua, “Decolonization, educational language policy and nation building in plural societies: The development of Chinees education in Malaysia, 1950–1970,” International Journal of Educational Development 33, (2013); Ting-Hong Wong, “Education and State Formation Reconsidered: Chinese School Identity in Postwar Singapore,” Journal of Historical Sociology 16, no. 2 (2003).
12 Laurent Manière, “La politique française pour l’adaptation de l’enseignement en Afrique aprés les indépendances (1958–1964),” Histoire de l’éducation, no. 128 (2010).
13 Corinna R. Unger, “The United States, Decolonization, and the Education of Thirs World Elites,” in Elites and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jost Dülffer and Marc Frey (New York: Palgrave macmillan, 2011).
14 Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, “New Histories of the United Nations,” Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008); Klaas Dykmann, “Only with the best intentions: International Organizations as Global Civilizers,” Comparativ 23, no. 4/5 (2014).
15 David Strang, “Global Patterns of Decolonization, 1500–1987,” International Studies Quarterly 335, no. 4 (1991).
16 From the wealth of literature on decolonization that shows the complexity of experiences under the heading of decolonization. Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, Dekolonisation. Das Ende der Imperien (München: Beck, 2013); Nicola Miller, Republics of Knowledge. Latin America in the 19th Century. (New York: Princeton University Press, Forthcoming 2019). After 1945: Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization, 2nd ed., The making of the contemporary world (New York: Routledge, 2004); Martin Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Massachusetts: Blackwell Pub., 2008).
17 We draw here from the distinction recently advanced by Jansen and Osterhammel, Dekolonisation, 7.
Marcelo Caruso
Abstract The chapter analyses the discourse on ‘colonial education’ in nineteenth-century Latin America. It shows the legitimizing role of the question of educational heritance in the decades after independence from Spanish colonial rule. In this earliest process of de-colonization, ‘colonial education’ became a common thread in public discourse in which at least two types of arguments were advanced. First, colonial education was added to the long list of colonial grievances that, in the view of the Latin Americans, made independence necessary and legitimate. Second, colonial education became a consistent argument when discussing why the new independent polities found such serious difficulties in consolidating a new political order. The chapter concludes that this referencing to the educational past became a feature of scholarly and political discourses.
Keywords: Latin America, legitimacy, historiography, colonial schools
In 1918, in the city of Córdoba (Argentina), a broad student movement ignited against the inherited forms of governance and scholarship at Argentinean universities. This “university reform movement”, in addition to having a major impact on educational and political circles in Latin America in the following decades, succeeded in imposing new forms of institutional governance and academic freedom.1 With all the enthusiasm of a revolt, the young students published a manifesto addressed to all Latin Americans, which would turn into one of the best-known texts in the region during the twentieth century. Their passionate celebration of university reform began with a suggestive reference to Argentinean independence one century before: “Men of a free Republic, we have just finished breaking the last chain that, even in the twentieth century, tied us ←21 | 22→down to the old order of monarchic and monastic domination.”2 The students in Córdoba saw themselves as part of a broader liberating movement, the great movement for political independence that had begun a hundred years earlier to break the “first” chain of “monarchic and monastic domination”.
It may be somewhat unexpected that revolting students after more than one hundred years of political independence still insisted in evoking colonial times for naming all things past, backward, or simply illegitimate. After all, Argentinians had governed the country since 1816 and they did it from the very beginning by favoring a break with colonial policies by founding republican institutions, through free commerce and a relatively ample, albeit only formal, enfranchisement of the male adult population. The meanings these students actualized in their manifest were both old and still effective: references to colonial times, including colonial education, persisted through the nineteenth century and became a political and scholarly pattern of argumentation with varied shapes and functions. The fascinating history of Latin American independence reverberated in these statements and expressed present hopes and past frustrations.
Initiated in 1808, Latin American independencies3 led, in the long run, to the formation of 19 different polities out of four big colonial units called viceroyalties. Although shortly after independence preferences for a post-colonial political regime oscillated between monarchy and republic, all of these new polities eventually became republican regimes. Similarly, a strong tendency for leaving behind all traces of the old political regime prevailed on various societal levels from 1820 onwards. This process also entailed a good deal of utopian energy. The irruption of political modernity in the region reached a level and influence4 that even progressive-minded European contemporaries considered too radical in many respects.5 Aligning with a quite global ←22 | 23→pattern,6 hopes and utopian ideas had given way to a more moderate and disillusioned approach by the middle of the century. The consolidation of the Latin American republics, mostly after 1850, became a rather patchy modern project, quite principled in its declarations but with increasingly conservative features.
In the following, I will explore the discourse on ‘colonial education’ in post-colonial times as a recurring motif in the construction of post-colonial legitimacy. The afterlife of ‘colonial education’ in post-colonial writings certainly played a role here, and came close to being a ghost haunting the new republics. I will treat the discourse surrounding colonial education as an ambiguous way of decolonializing educational practices and institutions. I do so by analyzing different works of Latin American intellectuals in the nineteenth century as the main leads into the discourse on colonial education in that time, using “discourse” in a loose Foucauldian way. Central elements of colonial education, the spread of universities, the lack of consistent elementary education and the dominance of the Jesuits until their expulsion from all Spanish American colonies in 1767, were amply referred to after independence as keys to understanding the ailments of the new republics.
I want to show that references to colonial education became an intellectual and political operation, in which statements were created for certain purposes and in specific situations through concrete actors (or groups of actors). The idea that
