this consensus also included the effects of colonial education as having been invariably negative considering the task of building up new republics. ←27 | 28→Firstly, people outside of colonial schools were part of the overall gloomy picture. As the radical Central American philosopher, politician, and journalist José Cecilio del Valle (1780–1834) put it when he listed some “colonial crimes”: “The condemnation of the natives to the most stupid ignorance, perpetuating their tutelage in consideration of the ignorance in which they were kept.”22 Secondly, even persons educated during the old colonial order were not suited to the new state of society: “Their instruction suffered from one thousand defects due to the systems of teaching; the small number of sciences cultivated at the University or the lack of books, the adherence to old methods, to formulations and so many other defects of colonial education […].”23 The consequences were obvious. An anonymous contemporary author that discussed “provincialism” as an urgent problem of his time in the context of Mexican politics, confirmed the negative image of the inherited educational practices and institutions. His adamant condemnation of the overly dominant religious element, the generally poor state in which schools found themselves in and the harming strategies of the Spanish colonists culminated in a characterization of the aims of colonial education as “getting accustomed to suffering, indolence, the almost sacred respect to the established authorities, ignorance, superstition, humiliation, obedience and distinction of classes”. Moreover, “their habits [those of the Mexicans, MC] became fixed and have been passed over from generation to generation until the very present.”24 This was certainly not the only statement about “inexperience and colonial education” as the main causes of the “disgraces” affecting the new republics.25 And this effect was deemed to run throughout as a structural one: in intellectual circles writers of different provenience lamented the long-term effects of colonial education as being felt “since centuries”.26
Thirdly, this degraded and negative education was, as most writers agreed, not the work of a blind and simple stupidity; on the contrary it was seen as a ←28 | 29→purposeful effect of colonial rule: “All the efforts from Spain were directed towards brutalizing us. Spain put all kind of obstacles to our population, our education, our agriculture, our industry because they feared our progress and only desired our degradation.”27 Many decades later the feeling still prevailed that this education was a work of “high refinement in its malice”.28 Largely ignoring similar restrictive developments of education in Spain, critics of colonial rule saw in colonial education an intentional means of maintaining colonial hegemony: “It was convenient to them [the Spaniards, MC] to maintain the colonies in a state of ignorance and with the vices that loosen the Man from its native place, extinguish patriotic love, unnerve the spirits and debase persons.”29 Independence fighters constantly invoked episodes, in which colonial rule explicitly hindered educational progress. They listed numerous fruitless petitions from Buenos Aires, Yucatan, Guatemala and Quito asking for permission to establish new schools: “Thirty years ago, in the last century, cacique Juan Cirilo Castilla, wanted permission to establish a college for natives in his homeland Puebla de los Angeles. He died in Madrid without success.”30 Others continued to collect such grievances, such as the Venezuelan general José Antonio Páez (1790–1873), who had been a leader in the struggle for independence of his country from Gran Colombia in 1830. Decisions by the Spanish crown discouraging the establishment of schools for natives from 1785, the negative answer to the project of the city council of Buenos Aires for establishing a new School of nautical drawing (a project that the crown purportedly characterized as “presumptuous”) and scattered evidence of Catholic officials defining the Christian doctrine as everything that the creole population of the Americas needed for her education were all constantly cited and kept inflaming the spirits.31 Still, in the late nineteenth century authors described how some representatives of the colonial government had admitted with “insolent frankness”, that it was the purpose of educational ←29 | 30→politics to maintain the inferior status of the Hispanic Americans.32 The case was clear: colonial rule implied a purposeful plan of keeping the Americans in a state of ignorance.
‘Colonial Education’ and the troubles of the new polities
One of the few virtues of colonial education in a retrospective view was its full compatibility with despotic rule. Particularly against the background of political instability after independence, this feature of colonial education became evident. In the words of the Argentinean writer and historian Andrés Lamas (1817–1891): “The elements of colonial life were connected – education and popular habits were in direct and immediate relationship to colonial policies.”33 This judgement echoed an older discourse coined by Montesquieu holding that education and political system had to be congruent. Others like the Mexican Simón Tadeo Ortiz de Ayala (1788–1833), advocated “a rational system of instruction (…) in harmony with the political regime adopted by the nation; without its development and operation, liberal institutions, in constant struggle against decadent habits, would only be beautiful theories […]”.34 He echoed a position already formulated in a project for elementary education addressed to the chambers of congress in Mexico in 1826: “A polity in which instruction is not in perfect harmony with the laws is untenable.”35 Now, under new republican circumstances, the probably unique positive effect of colonial education had lost its efficacy.
This retrospective view was quite understandable in view of the troublesome times the new republics had to face. Civil unrest, civil wars and confusion about the territorial distribution of some provinces overshadowed early hopes and favored a grim outlook on the future. ‘Colonial education’ continued to serve as a plausible explanation. For instance, the official gazette in Bolivia admitted ←30 | 31→in 1829 that the negative opinion of some Europeans about the new polities in South America was grounded in troubling facts and in an exaltation of ideas “[…] we could never have acquired if we haven’t had colonial education […]”.36 Still in the Bolivian parliamentary assembly from 1846 the “defects of colonial education” helped to explain “the demoralization caused in the people through the untamed passions of the civil war”.37 From Costa Rica – “Liberty without reason” was the result of the “people that have no idea of true liberty because of colonial education […]”38 – to Mexico where colonial education equaled the “seeds of civil discord”39 – this leitmotiv circulated. Progressive forces used this attribution of responsibility in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to discuss the further development of the young republics towards democracy. In the view of an early Chilean historian, “the prejudices of colonial education” promoted opposition to the “development of democratic ideas”.40
Whereas the argument of colonial education affecting post-colonial
