The heritage of independence
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Spanish colonies enjoyed a prosperity that led to optimism, thoughts of independence, and republican rule. In the prolonged struggle for independence, they were all but ruined, and the change from absolute monarchy to popular democracy was far from easy. The revolutionaries tried to follow the U.S. model, but novel institutions clashed with those of the past; governmental practice did not follow political theory; and the legal equality of the citizens hardly corresponded to economic and educational realities.
The new governments all considered education essential to the development of good citizens and to the process of modernization. Accordingly, they tried to expand schools and literacy, but they faced two obstacles. Their first was a disagreement over what should form the content of education. Since the time of the Enlightenment, political tyranny and the Roman Catholic Church had been blamed for backwardness. Thus, once independence had been achieved, the liberals tried to get rid of the church’s privileges and to secularize education. The conservatives, however, wanted to follow traditional educational patterns and considered Catholicism a part of the national character. After decades of confrontation, the liberals in many countries managed to make education both secular in character and a state monopoly. In other countries, such as Colombia, by way of a concordat with the Holy See, religious education became the official one.
The second obstacle to educational expansion was a financial one. The new governments lacked the means with which to establish new schools. Thus, they began to import the Lancaster method of “mutual” instruction (named for its developer, the English educator Joseph Lancaster), which in monitorial fashion employed brighter or more proficient children to teach other children under the direction of an adult master or teacher. Its obvious advantage was that it could accomplish an expansion of education rather quickly and cheaply. Beginning in 1818, it was introduced in Argentina and then in Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Brazil. Until well into the second half of the 19th century, it was to be the most widely used system.
Almost all the heroes of independence tried to establish schools and other educational institutions. José de San Martín founded the National Library and the Normal Lancasteriana, a teacher-training school, in Lima; Simón Bolívar established elementary schools in convents and monasteries and founded the Ginecco (1825), known afterward as the Normal Lancasterian School for Women. Bernardino Rivadavia, the first president of Argentina, also stimulated educational development, including the establishment of the University of Buenos Aires. In mid-century Benito Juárez in Mexico also championed education as the only bulwark against chaos and tyranny.
By the 1870s the liberals had won the day almost everywhere throughout Latin America. Education was declared to be compulsory and free, the lack of teachers and teacher colleges notwithstanding. A program to remedy this situation was launched. Chile paid for the educator Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s travels to the United States and Europe and enabled him to found, on his return in 1842, the Normal School for Teachers. This was the first non-Lancasterian teachers’ college and was to be followed in 1850 by the Central Normal School in Lima and in 1853 by the Normal School for Women in Santiago. Countries with more acute educational problems, such as Ecuador, simply imported the Brothers and Sisters of the Sacred Heart and put them in charge of organizing their educational system. During the 1870s and ’80s, foreign teachers began to be imported and students were sent abroad. Sarmiento had already called in North American teachers to open his normal schools in the 1860s, and Chile invited Germans for its Pedagogical Institute (1889). Germans and Swiss came to Mexico and Colombia; a number of distinguished Mexican educators were trained by Germans in the Model School in Orizaba. With the foreign professors came new pedagogical ideas—especially those of Friedrich Froebel and Johann Friedrich Herbart—and also new ideologies, foremost among them positivism, which flourished in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico.