Decolonization(s) and Education. Daniel Maul

this degraded and negative education was, as most writers agreed, not the work of a blind and simple stupidity; on the contrary it was seen as a ←28 | 29→purposeful effect of colonial rule: “All the efforts from Spain were directed towards brutalizing us. Spain put all kind of obstacles to our population, our education, our agriculture, our industry because they feared our progress and only desired our degradation.”²⁷ Many decades later the feeling still prevailed that this education was a work of “high refinement in its malice”.²⁸ Largely ignoring similar restrictive developments of education in Spain, critics of colonial rule saw in colonial education an intentional means of maintaining colonial hegemony: “It was convenient to them [the Spaniards, MC] to maintain the colonies in a state of ignorance and with the vices that loosen the Man from its native place, extinguish patriotic love, unnerve the spirits and debase persons.”²⁹ Independence fighters constantly invoked episodes, in which colonial rule explicitly hindered educational progress. They listed numerous fruitless petitions from Buenos Aires, Yucatan, Guatemala and Quito asking for permission to establish new schools: “Thirty years ago, in the last century, cacique Juan Cirilo Castilla, wanted permission to establish a college for natives in his homeland Puebla de los Angeles. He died in Madrid without success.”³⁰ Others continued to collect such grievances, such as the Venezuelan general José Antonio Páez (1790–1873), who had been a leader in the struggle for independence of his country from Gran Colombia in 1830. Decisions by the Spanish crown discouraging the establishment of schools for natives from 1785, the negative answer to the project of the city council of Buenos Aires for establishing a new School of nautical drawing (a project that the crown purportedly characterized as “presumptuous”) and scattered evidence of Catholic officials defining the Christian doctrine as everything that the creole population of the Americas needed for her education were all constantly cited and kept inflaming the spirits.³¹ Still, in the late nineteenth century authors described how some representatives of the colonial government had admitted with “insolent frankness”, that it was the purpose of educational ←29 | 30→politics to maintain the inferior status of the Hispanic Americans.³² The case was clear: colonial rule implied a purposeful plan of keeping the Americans in a state of ignorance.

      ‘Colonial Education’ and the troubles of the new polities

One of the few virtues of colonial education in a retrospective view was its full compatibility with despotic rule. Particularly against the background of political instability after independence, this feature of colonial education became evident. In the words of the Argentinean writer and historian Andrés Lamas (1817–1891): “The elements of colonial life were connected – education and popular habits were in direct and immediate relationship to colonial policies.”³³ This judgement echoed an older discourse coined by Montesquieu holding that education and political system had to be congruent. Others like the Mexican Simón Tadeo Ortiz de Ayala (1788–1833), advocated “a rational system of instruction (…) in harmony with the political regime adopted by the nation; without its development and operation, liberal institutions, in constant struggle against decadent habits, would only be beautiful theories […]”.³⁴ He echoed a position already formulated in a project for elementary education addressed to the chambers of congress in Mexico in 1826: “A polity in which instruction is not in perfect harmony with the laws is untenable.”³⁵ Now, under new republican circumstances, the probably unique positive effect of colonial education had lost its efficacy.

This retrospective view was quite understandable in view of the troublesome times the new republics had to face. Civil unrest, civil wars and confusion about the territorial distribution of some provinces overshadowed early hopes and favored a grim outlook on the future. ‘Colonial education’ continued to serve as a plausible explanation. For instance, the official gazette in Bolivia admitted ←30 | 31→in 1829 that the negative opinion of some Europeans about the new polities in South America was grounded in troubling facts and in an exaltation of ideas “[…] we could never have acquired if we haven’t had colonial education […]”.³⁶ Still in the Bolivian parliamentary assembly from 1846 the “defects of colonial education” helped to explain “the demoralization caused in the people through the untamed passions of the civil war”.³⁷ From Costa Rica – “Liberty without reason” was the result of the “people that have no idea of true liberty because of colonial education […]”³⁸ – to Mexico where colonial education equaled the “seeds of civil discord”³⁹ – this leitmotiv circulated. Progressive forces used this attribution of responsibility in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to discuss the further development of the young republics towards democracy. In the view of an early Chilean historian, “the prejudices of colonial education” promoted opposition to the “development of democratic ideas”.⁴⁰

Whereas the argument of colonial education affecting post-colonial political culture became a persistent pattern of discourse throughout the whole nineteenth century, a new kind of problem related to the question 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