Bulmer-Thomas V., Coatsworth J., Cortes-Conde R. The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America: Volume 2, The Long Twentieth Century

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

432 Fernando Reimers

obedience to authority (magister dixit) and conformity, rather than inde-

pendent and critical thinking.

The most established educational institutions in pre-Columbian times

served to educate the ruling elites of the people of Mesoamerica and of the

Incas.

This conservative ideology was replaced by another conservative set

of ideas of the Spanish colonizers, who also saw the function of the (new)

educational institutions as to educate the (new) elites, the Spaniards and

criollos.Acombination of royal mandates and religious initiatives laid the

foundation for the ﬁrst schools in the Spanish colonies in the Americas.

The colonial conservative education view also sought to extend the Catholic

faith among the people of the Americas and, consequently, the submission

to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Religious orders were the

ﬁrst to establish and run schools and universities from the ﬁfteenth to the

eighteenth centuries.

Although it is possible to ﬁnd some examples of progressive educational

initiatives during this period, their scope was modest. In 1792, for example,

Fray Jos

eSan Alberto, Archbishop of La Plata, established the Escuela de

nas Pobres San Alberto in Chuquisaca.

An alternative movement, led by

the Jesuits, educated indigenous people in the reductions of Bolivia and

Paraguay. This education for self-reliance, along with the reductions per se,

was interrupted by the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767.

The dominant policy throughout much of the colonial period was one

of educating the elites, and educating them for obedience to authority. The

Royal Cedula of 1785 of King Carlos IV established that it was not desir-

able to “illustrate the Americans.” “His Majesty does not need philosophers,

but good and obedient subjects.”

This Cedula authorized boroughs (par-

roquias)toestablish religious schools, which would also teach basic literacy

for the children of Spaniards and criollos.

The creation of universities for the elites was the most signiﬁcant edu-

cational development of this period. As a result, universities had long been

In the Valley of Mexico, the Mexicashad separate schools for the nobles (calmecac) and the commoners

(telpochcalli). They instructed in the arts of war, in religious rites, and possibly in trades related to

the productive specialization of the calpulli.Outstanding educational achievement allowed some

commoners to ascend in the social structure. See Pablo Escalante, Educaci

on e ideolog

ıa en el M

exico

antiguo (Mexico City, 1985), 17. Also see Alfredo L

opez Austin, La educaci

on de los antiguos nahuas

(Mexico City, 1985), 26–8.Inthe Inca empire, selected women received segregated education in

Ajllawaci.The houses of knowledge, the Yachaywasis,were reserved for the nobles. Jos

eJu

arez and

Sonia Comboni, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia (La Paz, 1997).

arez and Comboni, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia.

Ibid.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

Education and Social Progress 433

established and consolidated by the time national public education systems

were created in the nineteenth century.

The struggle between the conservative and progressive ideologies was

embedded in the larger political competition between conservatives and

liberals, with liberals advocating the expansion of universal public primary

education and challenging Church dominance, and conservatives espousing

education controlled by the Church. In Colombia and Ecuador, for exam-

ple, the dominance of the Church in the provision of education, an edu-

cation that mandated teaching of Catholicism, was supported by a landed

oligarchy of political conservatives.

In Mexico, after independence, liber-

als and conservatives agreed on the importance of education, but disagreed

sharply after 1824 on the role of the Church and freedom of instruction.

Although the Mexican liberals initially opposed the intervention of the

state in education, in the 1830s, they proposed state-led education as a way

to curb the dominance of the Church and of the conservatives.

For the best part of the ﬁrst three centuries since the establishment of

the Spanish colonies in the Americas, the notion that education served to

legitimate a social order and the existing social structure was unchallenged.

The independence movement and the emergence of the new republics

in the late 1700s and early 1800s introduced alternative expectations for

schools.

The 1800swere characterized by political battles among different elite

groups. In some cases, these battles resulted in changes in the structure of

the economy. Economic reorganization, and the accompanying urbaniza-

tion, provided a receptive context for the implementation of a different

educational ideology. This new ideology no longer saw educational insti-

tutions as the bulwarks of the agricultural social order of the past. Rather,

educational institutions were seen as the heralds of a new urban and indus-

trial society and as the gateways through which new social groups would

move upward to senior and mid-level leadership positions in the economy

and in the new political and administrative institutions.

Tw o core related ideas emerged in the nineteenth century that formed

the basis of the developments of the twentieth century. The ﬁrst was a

challenge to the dominance of the church in the conduct of education

(the Church, loyal to the Spanish Crown, identiﬁed with the conservative

Jos

eH.Serrano, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de la Rep

ublica de Colombia (Madrid, 1993), and

Carlos Poveda, ed., Sistema educativo nacional del Ecuador (Quito, 1994).

Germ

an Alvarez, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de M

exico (Mexico City, 1994).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

434 Fernando Reimers

movement). The intellectual foundation of the independence movement,

which advocated an egalitarian ethic and independence of inquiry and

thought, also challenged a Church identiﬁed with an authoritarian social

order and with religious dogma as superior to human reasoning as basis for

the construction of truth. The second idea, originating in the early period

of independence, was that all should have access to primary education and

that the state had a responsibility to provide that access. This idea took hold

and found its way into new education laws and, in several cases, into the

constitutions of the new republics. As the independent nations consolidated

during the nineteenth century, the ambition of universal, publicly provided

primary education gained acceptance throughout Latin America.

The postindependence movement brought clear expectations that edu-

cation be central in the formation of the new Americans’ identity and in

the inclusion of heretofore marginalized groups of the population for social

participation. This progressive aspiration coexisted with the conservative

view that saw divided education (education for the new elites, but only

fundamental instruction to mestizos and the lower classes) as appropri-

ate. The French Revolution inﬂuenced the South American independence

movement with the ideals of Freedom, Equality, and Justice, shaping the

aspiration to universalize access to primary education. Sim

on Bol

ıvar, well

versed in the works of Rousseau and the Utopians, wrote eloquently about

the pivotal role of education in the newly independent nations. Two of his

teachers and close associates, Sim

on Rodr

ıguez and Andr

es Bello, played

key roles in shaping the new ideology of the role of education in the newly

independent nations.

As ﬁrst president of Bolivia, Bol

ıvar appointed Sim

on Rodr

ıguez as ﬁrst

Director General of Public Education. In a decree dated December 11, 1825,

they established that education, which must be general and for all, is the ﬁrst

duty of the government and that the health of the republic rests on the moral

dispositions that the citizens acquire in schools at an early age.

In 1835,

Ecuador, another of the republics that gained independence from Spain

as part of the same movement, adopted the ﬁrst law of public education,

establishing the directorate of education and an inspectorate system.

As a result of the inﬂuence of Bello and Sarmiento, in the mid-nineteenth

century, most public schools in Chile were aimed at providing literacy

skills to poor children.

Table 11.1 summarizes the ﬁrst legal documents to

recognize universal public primary education as a state responsibility.

arez and Comboni, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia.

Ivan Nu

nez, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de Chile (Santiago, 1993).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

Education and Social Progress 435

Table 11.1. First legal documents proposing universal primary education in

Latin America

Country Year Legal instrument and purpose

Peru 1823 Constitution establishes that Congress will regulate education

through periodic plans. It also indicates that instruction is a

common need for all and that the Republic owes it to all

citizens.

Bolivia 1825 Decree establishing general education as a government

responsibility.

Peru 1828 Constitution establishes free primary instruction for all citizens.

Chile 1833 Constitution recognized freedom of teaching – from authority of

the Church – while assigning to the state a strong mandate in

the promotion and oversight of education. In 1920,aPrimary

Education Law established compulsory primary education.

Ecuador 1835 First law of public education.

Cuba 1841 Royal order establishing free education for poor children.

Bolivia 1851 Constitution establishes universal right to education.

Independent education under the supervision of the state.

Established creation of schools for girls. Established free

primary schooling.

Mexico 1867 First Law of Public Instruction establishes primary education free

and compulsory for “the poor,” excludes religious instruction

from the curriculum.

Costa Rica 1869 Decrees free and compulsory primary education.

Venezuela 1870 Decree of public, compulsory, and free primary instruction and

creation of the Ministry of Education.

Argentina 1884 First law approving compulsory primary schooling.

Colombia 1886 Constitution establishes free primary schooling.

Sources: Jos

eJu

arez and Sonia Comboni, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia (La

Paz, 1997); Jos

eH.Serrano, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de la rep

ublica de Colombia

(Madrid, 1993); Olman Ram

ırez, Sistema educativo nacional de Costa Rica (Madrid, 1997);

Ivan Nu

nez, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de Chile (Santiago, 1993); Germ

an Alvarez, ed.,

Sistema educativo nacional de M

exico (Mexico City, 1994); Ministerio de Educaci

on de la

Rep

ublica del Per

u, Sistema educativo nacional del Peru (Lima, 1994); Enid P

erez, Sistema

educativo nacional de Venezuela (Caracas, 1995).

This victory of progressive policy was soon followed by the creation of

institutions that would make it possible to implement national education

policies. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the creation of

incipient national education systems and structures. This was also a time

when the new nation-states launched large-scale education initiatives in

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

436 Fernando Reimers

curriculum design, provision of educational materials, and teacher educa-

tion. These initiatives provided the intellectual, legal, and organizational

foundation that made possible the massive expansion of the twentieth

century.

Transnational exchanges supported the development of public education

as foreign educators played advisory and management roles in support of

the emerging public education systems, facilitating the exchange of ideas,

instructional materials, and practices. Venezuelan-born Andr

es Bello was

the ﬁrst rector of the Universidad de Chile. At the time, the university

was in charge of the supervision of the public education system. It trained

teachers and developed curricula. Bello was among those who ﬁrst advo-

cated for education and cultural institutions to shape a new identity for

the new Americans. The grammar of the Spanish language he developed

challenged Spain’s Royal Academy of the Language by recognizing how

language was used in Ibero-America. As rector of the Universidad de Chile,

Bello instituted a contest to encourage essays on the kind of primary educa-

tion system that would best ﬁt the American social, political, and economic

project.

Argentine-born Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, also working in Chile,

won this contest with an essay that argued for the common school (Edu-

caci

on Com

un), a mandatory and free center for the formation of the politi-

cal identity of all the citizens of the newly independent nations. Sarmiento’s

ideas on the common school were very inﬂuential in Chile (where he

directed the ﬁrst teacher training institution), then in Argentina (where he

became Minister of Education and President) and Paraguay.

Through the

works of some of his followers, like Jos

ePedro Varela in Uruguay, these ideas

extended to other countries as well.

Sarmiento visited Massachusetts, to

learn ﬁrsthand of the efforts of Horace Mann to build a broad-based coali-

tion to garner support for the “common school” and became a friend of

Horace’s wife Mary Peabody Mann, with whom he maintained an active

correspondence focusing on educational, scientiﬁc, and political develop-

ment.

Sarmiento brought the ﬁrst teachers from the United States to

Gregorio Weinberg, “Andr

es Bello,” in Zaghloul Morzy, ed., Pensadores de la educaci

on (Paris, 1993),

84.

Hector Bravo, “Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,” in Pensadores de la Educaci

on, 506–7.

MartaDemarchi and Hugo Rodr

ıguez, “Jose Pedro Varela,” in Pensadores de la Educaci

on, 719–

34.

Barry Velleman, ed., My Dear Sir: Mary Mann’s Letters to Sarmiento (Buenos Aires, 2001).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

Education and Social Progress 437

Argentina. The ﬁrst Argentine textbooks were translated from English and

French.

The translation of textbooks and curricula and the reliance on education

advisors from nations with more established public education systems were

resources commonly used by those working to establish public education

systems. In Bolivia, school curricula in 1879 were translated from Dutch

curricula for primary schools and French textbooks of Guillet-Damitt were

adopted as ofﬁcial textbooks. A Belgian educator directed the ﬁrst normal

school in Bolivia, established in 1909, with collaboration from a delegation

of Chilean educators. Colombia received technical assistance from a group

of German educators who, in 1867, advised the National Directorate of

Public Instruction. Teacher training institutions were set up following the

German model at the time. In the late nineteenth century, Ecuador, too,

received a mission from Germany to reform teacher training institutions

and demonstration schools and, later on, to reform the curricula.

In Chile, during the 1880s, German educators ran the teacher training

institutions (escuelas normales) and reformed primary education. In 1889,

they established the Pedagogical Institute to train secondary school teachers,

which would later be incorporated into the Universidad de Chile as part of

the faculty of philosophy and education.

Chile, in turn, through exchanges and technical assistance, supported the

development of public education in other countries in Latin America. At

the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, the Bolivian govern-

ment provided scholarships to teachers for training in Chilean institutions.

Chilean missions of education advisors worked in Bolivia at the beginning

of the century with the Directorate of Primary Schools and of Languages.

Agroup of Chilean teacher trainers also worked in teacher education. In

1935,agroup of Chilean educators arrived in Costa Rica to advise on the

reform of basic and secondary education and in the reestablishment of the

university.

THE INTENSIFICATION OF EDUCATION

POLITICS DURING THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY

The ﬁrst half of the twentieth century served to consolidate the national sys-

tems of public education initiated in the latter part of the previous century.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

438 Fernando Reimers

This resulted in an increasing centralization of education governance, sev-

ering existing ties between schools and local governments. The struggles

between liberals and conservatives continued, with the conservatives repre-

senting the interests of the landed oligarchies under attack by the emergent

industrialists. The speciﬁc education strategies advocated by each group

changed as interests on the social outcomes of education changed. Over

time, conservatives came to accept the emphasis of liberals in providing uni-

versal elementary instruction once it no longer challenged the distribution

of social and economic privileges. As education strategies converged, the

struggle between conservatives and liberals moved to new terrains. By the

middle of the twentieth century, for instance, there was widespread accep-

tance of the desirability of providing universal primary education, originally

aprogressive idea, although this expansion was soon followed by a growing

social segmentation of primary schools as a result of quality disparities.

The consensus reached by elites on the importance of universal access to

elementary education was not reached with regard to the purposes of that

instruction and, consequently, with regard to issues of curriculum content

or pedagogy. As a result, while there was subsequent progress in expanding

the educational attainment of the population and in closing attainment

gaps among social groups, there was not the same progress in addressing

the quality of instruction or in closing quality gaps. With segemented tiers

of quality at the elementary level, social divides moved up to secondary and

tertiary levels or instruction as some primary school graduates were deﬁ-

ciently prepared to continue their education at higher levels. The victory

of 100 years of progressive advocacy for universal primary education thus

took place at a time when the most relevant educational levels for economic

mobility became secondary and tertiary education.

Once national systems were established, all countries in Latin America

began national programs of education reform. As had been the case since

independence, education reforms had a clear political motivation and

expressed larger political projects. As one reform rapidly succeeded another

and as political competition increased, the gaps between policy rhetoric,

implementation, and results increased.

The gaps between education policy rhetoric and implementation have been observed in other regions

beyond Latin America. Tyack and Cuban, for example, examining a century of education reform

in the United States, conclude that the basic grammar of schooling has proved quite resistant to

policy-induced change. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia. A Century of

Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 85–109.Mark Hanson suggests that the gap between

policy and implementation is particularly large in Latin America and attributes this to the fact

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

Education and Social Progress 439

The policy–implementation gap was particularly large with regard to

those policy objectives upon which there was less social consensus, namely

the incorporation of marginalized groups and rural and indigenous chil-

dren, and with regard to providing high quality instruction to the poor. The

achievement of equal educational opportunity was the most contentious of

all goals proposed for education in the twentieth century. This is the reason

for the large gap we observe today between progressive rhetoric and imple-

mentation results. Policy elites did not agree that equal opportunity and

outcomes were desirable and they disagreed on what equality of educational

opportunity meant.

The twentieth-century reforms directed at equality of educational oppor-

tunity have been of two kinds. The ﬁrst and most signiﬁcant reform was an

unprecedented educational expansion, which established the supremacy of

public education. This policy of state-led educational development came

to be known as the Estado Docente and was the main victory of the pro-

gressive project during the century. The second set of reforms speciﬁcally

targeted marginalized children to receive more resources, attention, and

special programs. These reforms were highly contested and did not last

long. The most recent iteration of these reforms was initiated during the

1990s, amidst growing emphasis on cost cutting and improving educational

efﬁciency and competitiveness.

Undermining the gains of the quantitative expansion was a growing

process of social segmentation in educational institutions. The children

of dominant groups became gradually concentrated in institutions that

excluded those who had gained access to education as a result of progressive

victories. This social segregation occurred through patterns of residential

segregation, institutional practices of discrimination in public schools, and

the ﬂight of privileged groups to private institutions. The sharp social segre-

gation of schools struck a serious blow to the vision of the “common school”

developed by the founders of public education systems, ﬁrst by expanding

that the colonies had to implement laws and regulations designed in Spain. Recognizing that the

rulers had imperfect knowledge of the reality they were ruling over, local authorities would resort

to the practice of “se acata pero no se cumple” (we accept the ruling but do not comply). Mark

Hanson, Educational Reform and Administrative Development. The Cases of Colombia and Venezuela

(Stanford, CA, 1986), 15. Another way to interpret the facts observed by Hanson is that local elites

had sufﬁcient autonomy to advance their own agenda at the implementation stage even though the

process of policy formation constrained their ability of doing so at the policy-design stage. Examples

of this implementation gap were the dispositions of Kings Ferdinand the Catholic and Charles I

which compelled the encomenderos to educate indigenous people in the encomienda but which were

never implemented. Raul Bola

nos, “Or

ıgenes de la educaci

on p

ublica en M

exico,” in F. Solana, R.

Cardiel, and Raul Bola

nos, Historia de la educaci

on p

ublica en M

exico (Mexico City, 1981), 13–14.

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

440 Fernando Reimers

divided, rather than common, institutions, and second by allowing the

development of unequal tiers of quality in these separate schools.

Progressive ideas gained space in policy rhetoric, and also action, during

the ﬁrst half of the century, when the confrontation with a conservative

ideology was overt and when these ideas were part of a broader political

struggle aimed at resolving conﬂicts between competing groups in soci-

ety. Beginning in the 1950s, a modernizing ideology (desarrollismo) spread

rapidly throughout Latin America. The dominant import substitution

industrialization strategy, an ideology of state-led development, the grow-

ing process of urbanization, and the gradual mobilization of the emerging

middle classes all supported educational expansion.

Important gains in

access to education at all levels resulted from this convergence of social,

political, and economic forces.

In the 1960s, as political elites turned to authoritarian governments to

demobilize some of the most radical political groups, however, education

was purposefully emptied of its progressive political content. Then a new

desarrollismo emerged toward the late 1960s and 1970s; one that equated

development with economic growth and that was silent about human

rights, democracy, and social change. The purposes of schools would no

longer be to form democratic citizens but obedient workers. Schools would

focus on developing skills for economic industrialization while they con-

served the values of a traditional authoritarian and stagnant social order.

This emerging ideology weakened what had been a powerful mobilizing,

organizing framework and rendered it helpless to resist the penetration of a

neoconservative agenda during the 1980s. As import-substituting elites and

politicians, who had made their careers under state-led development, came

under siege during the 1980s, the struggle for equal educational opportu-

nity suffered the most serious setback in the century. Expanding access to

those groups not yet in school at each education level took a back seat to

the concern with improving the quality of education and the efﬁciency of

how education monies were spent. The purposes of schools narrowed in

yet another way, by emphasizing fewer academic subjects and, in practice,

low-order cognitive skills.

Neoconservatives advanced a renewed faith in markets as the best mech-

anisms to regulate collective action, including the distribution of public

The expansion of state bureaucracy, along with the new industries created during the century,

contributed to the creation of the jobs for the new middle classes, who in turn demanded more

education for their children.

P1: JPJ

0521812909c11aCB929-Bulmer 052181290 9 October 6, 2005 10:40

Education and Social Progress 441

goods and services. With states under attack, public education was under

stress. Public education funding was cut sharply under structural adjust-

ment programs. The quality of education, which had already been stretched

by the rapid expansion of the previous decades, declined. Efﬁciency-

enhancing education reforms and a new concern with “quality” spread

rapidly.

There was a renewed emphasis on streamlining the curriculum to

basic subjects (language, math, and sciences). The new emphasis on qual-

ity was, however, intellectually ﬂawed. In practice, quality came to mean

achieving the intended objectives of the curriculum without examining

whether those objectives were relevant to the new political challenges of

democratic citizenship or to the new economic challenges of high value-

added competitiveness. Quality was understood more as effectiveness in

achieving the objectives of the curriculum than as examining the level and

pertinence of those standards. Schools were again primarily to train work-

ers that could contribute to economic competitiveness in low-productivity

industries, rather than citizens who could make societies more democratic.

The century ended with renewed rhetoric addressing equality as an objective

and with incipient efforts to redress the growing education divides. Unlike

the ideologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however,

these ideas were now embedded within larger reforms seeking to improve

efﬁciency and were lukewarm about, when not directly opposed to, state-led

educational development. They also lacked the synergies resulting from

association with broader political agendas, parties, and social movements

that could mobilize educationally marginalized groups.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, three countries most clearly

represented those where a new economic and political order supported pro-

gressive education ideas: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. In these countries,

the successful export-oriented economy and associated urbanization and

large-scale immigration paved the way for a state-led national education

system that sought to quickly develop a national, modern identity among

These were also the emerging concerns of education elites in the leaders of the neoconservative

movement in the OECD, namely the United States and Great Britain. Some have argued that the

United States sought to extend this new set of priorities to countries under its political inﬂuence. John

Bock and G. Arthur, “Politics of Educational Reform: The Experience of a Foreign Technical Assis-

tance Project,” Educational Policy 5:3 (September 1991): 312–28. Also, see Gary Orﬁeld, “Policy and

Equity: Lessons of a Third of a Century of Educational Reforms in the United States,” in Fernando

Reimers, ed., Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 402.Others have suggested

that international banks, such as the World Bank, reﬂecting interbureaucratic politics, dominated by

economists who shared the tenets of the neoconservative agenda, supported reforms with very narrow

objectives and strategies. See Karen Mundy, “Educational Multilateralism and World Disorder,”

Comparative Education Review 42 (1998): 448–78.