Education, Citizenship and Democracy in Latin America, 1800-1860

• In Event: The ‘Democracy’ of the Caudillos in Latin America, 1810-1880 Part II

Abstract

During the decades when arbitrary authority prevailed in the new polities of Latin America debates on education policy were a prominent means of keeping alive the founding dream of building a modern utopia. Everyone had been talking about popular education during the wars of independence. It was perhaps the only priority upon which all sectors of the elites --whether royalists, reformers or revolutionaries-- could agree. Social order was the main motivation, but political participation was also a concern and, for a radical minority, public accountability. The independence era, the prolonged uncertainties of which presented an opportunity for what we now call blue skies thinking, produced some remarkably audacious plans for a popular education policy which integrated practical and political Enlightenment, featuring vocational and technical training as well as humanistic learning. Even though pressures both economic and political resulted in the introduction of Lancastrian methods in most countries during the 1820s, the early radicalism did not entirely fade away and indeed to many educationalists, especially women, seemed all the more compelling as caudillos claimed democratic credentials. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were strong critiques of rote learning and of the prevailing emphasis on morality and good conduct at the expense of practical knowledge. A selection of these debates, from a range of countries, will be analysed in this paper as a proxy for the questions of citizenship, democracy and social justice that lay at the heart of republican nation-making.

Author

• Nicola A Miller, University College London