part of my assumptions as well. Yet exploring colonial education as a discourse while constructing legitimacy in post-colonial times cannot include all types of discursive practices. Intellectual works – including early Latin American historiography – are therefore in focus. This implies that the impact this discourse had vis-à-vis wider audiences has to be treated separately. On the whole, this piece tells a story about the particular role of constructions of the past as one preferred source while constructing legitimacy in the post-colonial setting in Latin America.
Degraded, negative, purposeful: ‘Colonial Education’ in the early republican discussion
Critique against colonial education had already begun in the late colonial period as an element of wider criticism by supporters of the Spanish version of the ←23 | 24→Enlightenment against inherited educational structures. Education in the Jesuit colleges in particular was the subject of severe criticism.7 Yet a more specific discourse on colonial education only ignited when the young republics, many of them still fighting against Spanish and loyalist troops, discussed their options for the future.
One major actor shaping this discourse was Simon Bolívar (1783–1830) himself, the military leader and politician from the Caracas upper class that would be decisive in the fight against the Spaniards in the Northern part of South America. Contrary to the rather simplistic image of the radical liberator that current political movements such as the Venezuelan Chavismo try to consolidate, Bolívar was – generally speaking – by no means a radical liberal. He was, for instance, more than a little cautious about the quick extension of political rights to the whole adult male population. Bolívar repeatedly evoked ancient republican orders and did not hide a racial bias against colored populations.8 Yet, contrary to later racist discourses stressing differences between groups, Bolívar saw the main obstacle to the consolidation of the emerging republican order in the cultural environment. He strongly advocated for education according to the new principles of government. In the famous speech he rendered to the constitutional assembly of Gran Colombia at La Angostura in 1819, he described colonial rule as a combination of different “yokes”: “The People of America, bound with the triple yoke of ignorance, tyranny, and vice, could not acquire either knowledge, power, or virtue.”9 Education, certainly, should become a key for the acceptance and stabilization of the new republican order. Yet education as he understood it was not only about learning new rules and principles. For Bolívar, to fight against “this abject state of depression” entailed a wider purpose: “Pupils of such ←24 | 25→pernicious Masters – the lessons we received, and the examples we followed – were the most destructive. We were governed more by deceit and treachery than by force, and were degraded more by vice than by superstition. Slavery is the daughter of darkness, and an ignorant person is generally the blind instrument of his own ruin […].”10 In sum, colonial education was responsible for having formed “the habit of submission”, as Bolívar called it.11 And the task of the new republican education was first and foremost to erase this habit. Yet the second aspect of the new republican education was to inculcate the new political institutions vis-à-vis the new generations;12 forgetting and restarting however was in the first decades after independence a leitmotiv in the cultural politics of the elites.
The second most important military leader during the independence wars, José de San Martín (1778–1850), was equally clear about the necessity of an extended and new education in order to consolidate the new order. He saw the legacy of the “fatal colonial education” in Peru as the main obstacle for a “moderate exercise ←25 | 26→of the rights” achieved through independence and republican government.13 His explicit support for new pedagogies like the Lancasterian model of schooling showed the association of political with pedagogical ruptures.14 Bolívar’s and San Martín’s positions widely circulated in different South American countries – the speech at La Angostura for instance was published in the weekly press and in different pamphlets. The established argument of colonial education as a hindrance to sound republican development spread quickly. Echoes of this theme mushroomed among political elites. Manuel José Restrepo, who was in charge of the inner affairs of the Republic of Gran Colombia under the liberal-radical president Francisco de Paula Santander, voiced his conviction in his address to the Colombian congress in 1826 that colleges and universities had to undergo a deep transformation “like the one our political institutions have already suffered”. To deliberately forget about the past was again at the center of the program: “it is certainly painful to have to forget most of the things that we have learnt under the Spaniard colonial education and to study again; but it is necessary in order to put ourselves on the path of the progress of our century and to obtain the place we aspire among the truly civilized nations.”15
What kind of education was this colonial education and why did post-colonial elites take issue with it? First, colonial education was not simply “Spanish education”, but rather a second hand, degraded form it. In an overview of the state of education during colonial times published in London in 1826, this degraded form of education was a main point: “It was not sufficient to deprive the Americans of the liberty of action, they were deprived of liberty of thinking as well.”16 Public establishments of education in the colonial time were “a monument of imbecility” full of bad books “full of errors and deceit; in all of them they presented ←26 | 27→words as knowledge and false doctrines as dogmas”.17 Degradation came from poor content that the new republics had to overcome: “An impenetrable veil hid from us the foreign languages, chemistry, natural history and the history of civil associations; a dark shadow separated us from the acquaintance of our own country, our planet and the general mechanics of the universe; we did not have the faintest idea about the relations that tie the Man to society and among societies.”18 This assessment from an exiled liberal leader did not stand alone. On the other side of the aisle, conservative authors equally condemned this education. In an early Resúmen de la Historia de Venezuela from 1841 the state of education in colonial times was presented as having been “in the most lamentable situation, being the education of the people completely useless and that of the higher classes incomplete in many respects.”19 Ecclesiastical centers of learning had emerged relatively late in Venezuela – contrary to the early establishment of universities in many colonial cities like Lima, Mexico, and Santo Domingo – and a printing press, subject to many regulations, opened only in the first years of the nineteenth century. In the view of early republicans, cultural achievements of that time were possible in spite of the restrictive colonial policies. The conservative author of this introduction into Venezuelan history regretted that the American colonies were cut off from all other scientific progress in fields like zoology, botany, chemistry, and physics as well as from the discussion of economic and political theories.20 Adding insult to injury, the problem was not only the restricted range of knowledge circulating in the colonies, but also the way of its transmission: “To say the truth, colleges were only monastic enclosures where a lot of time got lost in religious practices […]. A severe regime or, better to say, harsh and tyrannical, early made the youth familiar with humiliating habits such as hypocrisy and lie; flogging punishments robbed them even of the idea of shame […]”21
