of economic progress and, particularly, free trade, came to be attributed to the effects of “colonial education” in the middle of the century: The Argentinean Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), a staunch liberal advocating free market policies, had no doubts that the gap between generous constitutional rights and the poor record of the new republics in matters of economic freedom was a “dangerous inconsequence” for the further development of the young republics. Following Rousseau’s idea of “education through things” and not only through formal instruction, a notion Alberdi extended to all political and cultural conditions, he clearly blamed “colonial education” for being the main counterforce against economic progress.41 The strong link between colonial rule and controlled and taxed commerce had educational effects that the modern republics now had to face. In a parliamentarian debate about the abolition of all customs in 1828, the project ←31 | 32→had not only commercial purposes, but educational ones. It was an element of a wider policy of “encouraging and revitalizing” the population “taking them out from the nullity of commercial ideas in which they were immersed as a result of colonial education”.42 Interestingly enough, colonial education was even an argument for those few intellectuals advocating protectionist trade policies. One Chilean author characterized the old monopolistic trade system of the Spaniards as failing to elevate work to a social beneficial force: “they merely made a means of colonial education out of it”.43
At least, three main economic aspects were linked to colonial education. First: “The bad colonial education has […] deep roots”, still causing a rejection of work and crafts among “decent people”, who clearly prefer to be lawyers or medical doctors.44 The argument was about the disdain for manual work and productive occupations in crafts and nascent industries, a pattern of meaning that continued well into the twentieth century.45 Second, colonial education, as Alberdi had formulated, was a major obstacle for free trade. Next to factors like “passports, inner customs, the levy, sequestrations, kidnappers, police mistrust, local hatred”, colonial education nourished “disastrous prejudices against change, among them against foreign trade” that stood in the way of the free flow of goods and capital.46 Third, and as a consequence, re-education was needed in the view of these intellectuals of economic development. The sluggish pace of the progress of formal instruction demanded, in the view of some, a more resolute course of action. This was the case with the Mexican politician and writer José María Lafragua (1813–1875) when he addressed the constitutional assembly of 1846 in Mexico City in his capacity as minister of interior and foreign policies. He lamented that immigration, or “colonization”, as many authors termed it at the time, had not been regulated in Mexico although liberal elites strongly supported it. Lafragua admitted that the causes of this failure were multiple. Yet “in my view, the most effective and powerful obstacle opposed to colonization has been the general upsetting reactions to the principle [of colonization, MC] and, then, in some regions, to the presence of foreigners; this is a precise effect ←32 | 33→of the prejudices coming from colonial education”.47 Again, during the polemic unleashed by the parliamentary treatment of the project of encouraging immigration into Mexico in the 1870s, a strong discussion about colonial inheritance ignited that explicitly included educational themes in the usual condemnatory formulations.48 I will not elaborate on the ambivalent meanings that the notion of “colonization” for immigration may have actualized. Yet, one aspect is of utmost significance here, i.e. that the project of massive immigration was clearly seen as a large program for re-education of the population through a new “education through things” and costumes, those brought by purportedly industrious European immigrants.
Dissenting voices certainly existed, yet for a long time they were somewhat marginal. In one of the earliest research works on the field of history of education at the end of the nineteenth century, the discomfort of the author with the subject ‘colonial education’ was evident. “In our present view, the colonial period is a synonym of backwardness, obscurantism, barbarism, ignorance.” The author, the historian José Manuel Frontaura Arana (1864–1904) lamented this situation and positioned his work vis-à-vis “the strong prejudice against everything that implied enlightenment and culture in Chile before independence.” Among these prejudices, he quoted that general opinion sustained that during colonial times no elementary public-school system existed, which he strongly denied.49 Yet this kind of consideration in a more ‘Hispanistic’ vein did not enter into the main corpus of scholarship, particularly in early historiography.
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Historiography as a bridge for new generations
Whereas “colonial education” played a role in diagnosing disappointing developments in politics and economy, it also became a recurrent theme of early Latin American historiography. These works guaranteed that colonial education as an argument survived those who had experienced it. Resolutely negative descriptions of colonial education filled the pages of early liberal works of regional and national historiography, describing a rigid, restrictive and out-dated educational reality in colonial times as the quintessence of the hardships and injustices that the colonial regime had inflicted upon the Hispanic Americans. In addition, as already mentioned, the consistence of habits and education in this description was certainly both strong and condemnable.50 Even when liberal elites were apparently more satisfied with the course of things, like in the case of Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century, an attentive scrutiny of colonial education was still required. Although Argentinean authors saw their country complacently as being populated by very “generous, educated and intelligent” people “always more liberal and more progressive than their governments”, they cautioned that the study of resistance to changes, a feature of colonial education, had to be consistently carried out.51 Yet conservative historiography had developed a differentiated argument as well. Like in the voluminous Historia eclesiástica y civil de Nueva Granada (published 1869), conservatives clearly condemned both colonial education and the liberal attempts to overcome it. The ambitious educational plans followed by liberals and reformers, the argument went, were simply unrealistic and the “acclimatization among the people of Colombia to those doctrines advanced by Rousseau, Voltaire, Destutt de Tracy, Constant, Say, Bentham, Fritot…” was clearly doomed to fail.52
Clearly, the leitmotiv of colonial education persisted through different historiographical waves. A case in point is the characterization of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766–1840), probably the impersonation of autocratic rule in post-colonial Latin America, who governed Paraguay with increasingly absolute powers between 1816 and 1840. The Chilean historian Manuel Bilbao ←34 | 35→(1827–1895), who wrote extensively about Francia and the Argentinean dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, really focused on colonial education as a major factor in the making of these autocracies. With regard to Francia’s dictatorship, causation was unambiguous: “Paraguay […] was organized under the power of Dr. Francia, who, taking advantage of the colonial education, isolated himself from the revolution and from the contact with the world […]”.53 The Argentinean psychiatrist and historian, José María Ramos Mejía (1849–1914), a staunch positivist who was about to become one of the major figures in Argentinean educational bureaucracy, later delivered a more detailed work of historical imagination on Francia. Fully imbued with
