Decolonization(s) and Education. Daniel Maul

police mistrust, local hatred”, colonial education nourished “disastrous prejudices against change, among them against foreign trade” that stood in the way of the free flow of goods and capital.⁴⁶ Third, and as a consequence, re-education was needed in the view of these intellectuals of economic development. The sluggish pace of the progress of formal instruction demanded, in the view of some, a more resolute course of action. This was the case with the Mexican politician and writer José María Lafragua (1813–1875) when he addressed the constitutional assembly of 1846 in Mexico City in his capacity as minister of interior and foreign policies. He lamented that immigration, or “colonization”, as many authors termed it at the time, had not been regulated in Mexico although liberal elites strongly supported it. Lafragua admitted that the causes of this failure were multiple. Yet “in my view, the most effective and powerful obstacle opposed to colonization has been the general upsetting reactions to the principle [of colonization, MC] and, then, in some regions, to the presence of foreigners; this is a precise effect ←32 | 33→of the prejudices coming from colonial education”.⁴⁷ Again, during the polemic unleashed by the parliamentary treatment of the project of encouraging immigration into Mexico in the 1870s, a strong discussion about colonial inheritance ignited that explicitly included educational themes in the usual condemnatory formulations.⁴⁸ I will not elaborate on the ambivalent meanings that the notion of “colonization” for immigration may have actualized. Yet, one aspect is of utmost significance here, i.e. that the project of massive immigration was clearly seen as a large program for re-education of the population through a new “education through things” and costumes, those brought by purportedly industrious European immigrants.

Dissenting voices certainly existed, yet for a long time they were somewhat marginal. In one of the earliest research works on the field of history of education at the end of the nineteenth century, the discomfort of the author with the subject ‘colonial education’ was evident. “In our present view, the colonial period is a synonym of backwardness, obscurantism, barbarism, ignorance.” The author, the historian José Manuel Frontaura Arana (1864–1904) lamented this situation and positioned his work vis-à-vis “the strong prejudice against everything that implied enlightenment and culture in Chile before independence.” Among these prejudices, he quoted that general opinion sustained that during colonial times no elementary public-school system existed, which he strongly denied.⁴⁹ Yet this kind of consideration in a more ‘Hispanistic’ vein did not enter into the main corpus of scholarship, particularly in early historiography.

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      Historiography as a bridge for new generations

Whereas “colonial education” played a role in diagnosing disappointing developments in politics and economy, it also became a recurrent theme of early Latin American historiography. These works guaranteed that colonial education as an argument survived those who had experienced it. Resolutely negative descriptions of colonial education filled the pages of early liberal works of regional and national historiography, describing a rigid, restrictive and out-dated educational reality in colonial times as the quintessence of the hardships and injustices that the colonial regime had inflicted upon the Hispanic Americans. In addition, as already mentioned, the consistence of habits and education in this description was certainly both strong and condemnable.⁵⁰ Even when liberal elites were apparently more satisfied with the course of things, like in the case of Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century, an attentive scrutiny of colonial education was still required. Although Argentinean authors saw their country complacently as being populated by very “generous, educated and intelligent” people “always more liberal and more progressive than their governments”, they cautioned that the study of resistance to changes, a feature of colonial education, had to be consistently carried out.⁵¹ Yet conservative historiography had developed a differentiated argument as well. Like in the voluminous Historia eclesiástica y civil de Nueva Granada (published 1869), conservatives clearly condemned both colonial education and the liberal attempts to overcome it. The ambitious educational plans followed by liberals and reformers, the argument went, were simply unrealistic and the “acclimatization among the people of Colombia to those doctrines advanced by Rousseau, Voltaire, Destutt de Tracy, Constant, Say, Bentham, Fritot…” was clearly doomed to fail.⁵²

Clearly, the leitmotiv of colonial education persisted through different historiographical waves. A case in point is the characterization of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766–1840), probably the impersonation of autocratic rule in post-colonial Latin America, who governed Paraguay with increasingly absolute powers between 1816 and 1840. The Chilean historian Manuel Bilbao ←34 | 35→(1827–1895), who wrote extensively about Francia and the Argentinean dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, really focused on colonial education as a major factor in the making of these autocracies. With regard to Francia’s dictatorship, causation was unambiguous: “Paraguay […] was organized under the power of Dr. Francia, who, taking advantage of the colonial education, isolated himself from the revolution and from the contact with the world […]”.⁵³ The Argentinean psychiatrist and historian, José María Ramos Mejía (1849–1914), a staunch positivist who was about to become one of the major figures in Argentinean educational bureaucracy, later delivered a more detailed work of historical imagination on Francia. Fully imbued with positivistic views of history and reclaiming a truly scientific approach in his ‘The neurosis of famous men in Argentine history’ (1878), he linked Francia’s colonial education with his posterior autocracy in pathological terms. Ramos Mejía claimed that Francia’s pathological character had had deep roots in his complexion and early education, but the education he had received at the University of Cordoba in today’s Argentina definitely reinforced his pathological tendencies. For Ramos Mejía, a “defective intellectual education” was an influence in producing “his extraordinary anomalies”. For instance, he compared the experience of being exposed to four years of theological studies to that of a tumor spreading in a healthy body.⁵⁴ Lastly, the very content of that scholastic education was like “falling into troubled waters where the old Aristotelian ideas that circulated were confounded by the barbaric comments of the Arabs”.⁵⁵ “This life of eternal intellectual masturbation had to be therefore necessarily harmful, that constant roaming of his mind oppressed by the shackles that tied him to the vague system of the Peripatetic school or to the old, moth-eaten parchment venerated during the excessive ecstasies in which those colonial scholars failed.”⁵⁶ Even if historiographical preferences changed from classic liberal to more positivistic and scientific views, colonial education proved a very productive theme for grappling with uncomfortable post-colonial realities.

Liberal historical accounts of colonial culture and education consistently devalued the main traits of colonial education.⁵⁷ Only very seldom were ←35 | 36→references to “colonial education” not outright negative, for instance its characterization as “fraternal” in a History of Uruguay.⁵⁸ It was probably also the work of historians, now as authors of textbooks for schools, that propagated the popularity of colonial education as leitmotiv for explaining post-colonial developments and brought this argument to the revolting students quoted at the beginning of this text. With the expansion of primary and secondary education at the end of the nineteenth century some textbooks repeating the pattern of meaning conveyed the message to larger