LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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).

17 We draw here from the distinction recently advanced by Jansen and Osterhammel, Dekolonisation, 7.

      Marcelo Caruso

‘To Forget Everything and to Learn Again.’ Post-colonial Republican Order, ‘Colonial Education’ and Legitimacy in Nineteenth Century Latin America

      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

In 1918, in the city of Córdoba (Argentina), a broad student movement ignited against the inherited forms of governance and scholarship at Argentinean universities. This “university reform movement”, in addition to having a major impact on educational and political circles in Latin America in the following decades, succeeded in imposing new forms of institutional governance and academic freedom.¹ With all the enthusiasm of a revolt, the young students published a manifesto addressed to all Latin Americans, which would turn into one of the best-known texts in the region during the twentieth century. Their passionate celebration of university reform began with a suggestive reference to Argentinean independence one century before: “Men of a free Republic, we have just finished breaking the last chain that, even in the twentieth century, tied us ←21 | 22→down to the old order of monarchic and monastic domination.”² The students in Córdoba saw themselves as part of a broader liberating movement, the great movement for political independence that had begun a hundred years earlier to break the “first” chain of “monarchic and monastic domination”.

      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.

Initiated in 1808, Latin American independencies³ led, in the long run, to the formation of 19 different polities out of four big colonial units called viceroyalties. Although shortly after independence preferences for a post-colonial political regime oscillated between monarchy and republic, all of these new polities eventually became republican regimes. Similarly, a strong tendency for leaving behind all traces of the old political regime prevailed on various societal levels from 1820 onwards. This process also entailed a good deal of utopian energy. The irruption of political modernity in the region reached a level and influence⁴ that even progressive-minded European contemporaries considered too radical in many respects.⁵ Aligning with a quite global ←22 | 23→pattern,⁶ hopes and utopian ideas had given way to a more moderate and disillusioned approach by the middle of the century. The consolidation of the Latin American republics, mostly after 1850, became a rather patchy modern project, quite principled in its declarations but with increasingly conservative features.

      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

Critique against colonial education had already begun in the late colonial period as an element of wider criticism by supporters of the Spanish version of the ←23 | 24→Enlightenment against inherited educational structures. Education in the Jesuit colleges in particular was the subject of severe criticism.⁷ Yet a more specific discourse on colonial education only ignited when the young republics, many of them still fighting against Spanish and loyalist troops, discussed their options for the future.

One major actor shaping this discourse was Simon Bolívar (1783–1830) himself, the military leader and politician from the Caracas upper class that would be decisive in the fight against the Spaniards in the Northern part of South America. Contrary to the rather simplistic image of the radical liberator that current political movements such as the Venezuelan Chavismo try to consolidate, Bolívar was – generally speaking – by no means a radical liberal. He was, for instance, more than a little cautious about the quick extension of political rights to the whole adult male population. Bolívar repeatedly evoked ancient republican orders and did not hide a racial bias against colored populations.⁸ Yet, contrary to later racist discourses stressing differences between groups, Bolívar saw the main obstacle to the consolidation of the emerging republican order in the cultural environment. He strongly advocated for education according to the new principles of government. In the famous speech he rendered to the constitutional assembly of Gran Colombia

Скачать книгу