Decolonization(s) and Education. Daniel Maul

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Название Decolonization(s) and Education
Автор произведения Daniel Maul
Жанр Учебная литература
Серия Studia Educationis Historica
Издательство Учебная литература
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9783631708484



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ed., The making of the contemporary world (New York: Routledge, 2004); Martin Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Massachusetts: Blackwell Pub., 2008).

      Marcelo Caruso

      Abstract The chapter analyses the discourse on ‘colonial education’ in nineteenth-century Latin America. It shows the legitimizing role of the question of educational heritance in the decades after independence from Spanish colonial rule. In this earliest process of de-colonization, ‘colonial education’ became a common thread in public discourse in which at least two types of arguments were advanced. First, colonial education was added to the long list of colonial grievances that, in the view of the Latin Americans, made independence necessary and legitimate. Second, colonial education became a consistent argument when discussing why the new independent polities found such serious difficulties in consolidating a new political order. The chapter concludes that this referencing to the educational past became a feature of scholarly and political discourses.

      Keywords: Latin America, legitimacy, historiography, colonial schools

      It may be somewhat unexpected that revolting students after more than one hundred years of political independence still insisted in evoking colonial times for naming all things past, backward, or simply illegitimate. After all, Argentinians had governed the country since 1816 and they did it from the very beginning by favoring a break with colonial policies by founding republican institutions, through free commerce and a relatively ample, albeit only formal, enfranchisement of the male adult population. The meanings these students actualized in their manifest were both old and still effective: references to colonial times, including colonial education, persisted through the nineteenth century and became a political and scholarly pattern of argumentation with varied shapes and functions. The fascinating history of Latin American independence reverberated in these statements and expressed present hopes and past frustrations.

      In the following, I will explore the discourse on ‘colonial education’ in post-colonial times as a recurring motif in the construction of post-colonial legitimacy. The afterlife of ‘colonial education’ in post-colonial writings certainly played a role here, and came close to being a ghost haunting the new republics. I will treat the discourse surrounding colonial education as an ambiguous way of decolonializing educational practices and institutions. I do so by analyzing different works of Latin American intellectuals in the nineteenth century as the main leads into the discourse on colonial education in that time, using “discourse” in a loose Foucauldian way. Central elements of colonial education, the spread of universities, the lack of consistent elementary education and the dominance of the Jesuits until their expulsion from all Spanish American colonies in 1767, were amply referred to after independence as keys to understanding the ailments of the new republics.

      I want to show that references to colonial education became an intellectual and political operation, in which statements were created for certain purposes and in specific situations through concrete actors (or groups of actors). The idea that the recurrent references to education in colonial times showed a supra-individual consistency and variation over a long time is part of my assumptions as well. Yet exploring colonial education as a discourse while constructing legitimacy in post-colonial times cannot include all types of discursive practices. Intellectual works – including early Latin American historiography – are therefore in focus. This implies that the impact this discourse had vis-à-vis wider audiences has to be treated separately. On the whole, this piece tells a story about the particular role of constructions of the past as one preferred source while constructing legitimacy in the post-colonial setting in Latin America.

      Degraded, negative, purposeful: ‘Colonial Education’ in the early republican discussion