Childhood Education and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Argentina: The Case of Buenos Aires

The study of nineteenth-century schooling and childhood in Argentina can shed valuable light on that nation’s changing political and social values. Schooling and childhood provide historical lenses through which we may analyze the delicate balance that existed between the political and behavioral uniformity often demanded by the elites and the heterodoxy which they encountered in different communities—between attempts at establishing ideological continuity and the fact of political dislocation. Ideological constructs associated with schooling intensified the competition between political and familial needs as parents became more cognizant that their children’s moral and political makeup could no longer be shaped solely by the family. The very idea that learning would increasingly take place in an environment beyond the control of parents had significant psychological, cultural, and political implications.¹ In their own way, the struggles associated with childhood schooling in Buenos Aires were a legacy of the difficult, antagonistic choices offered by the revolution.

This study focuses on the elites’ concerns about children and their role in Argentine society. These, in turn, will serve as a convenient point of departure to express, first, the tensions that existed between the private and the public spheres, and then the uneasy relationships between the private satisfaction sought by families and the public goals which motivated political authorities.² In the process, the analysis will point out essential features of an educational system which, shaped by the period’s political tensions, conditioned the training of youth in Buenos Aires. Empirical evidence comes from the archival documentation which contains the lessons taught by teachers, samples of students’ homework, reports prepared by school authorities, and censuses of the school population taken over the course of the nineteenth century in Buenos Aires.

Education as Ideology

Career mobility during the colonial period depended in great part on formal training. Education was an essential commodity through which aspirations for position, especially in the bureaucracy, could be satisfied. Position, in turn, provided opportunities to capitalize on the contacts that would further one’s position in this clientelistic society.³ Education in the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, however, had not been a privilege limited to the colonial aristocracy. The interest in educating children was widened considerably by the commercial and administrative needs of the region. The services required by Buenos Aires could only be provided by officials formally trained in the managerial and legal skills adaptable to the Spanish empire’s commercial and bureaucratic hub in the South Atlantic.⁴ By the late eighteenth century, the city had established a certain tradition in matters of formal education from which it would expand in the republican era. Law degrees and practical bureaucratic experience were especially valued by the royal administrative apparatus; without letrados and doctos, the efficiency sought in governance—a cherished value of the Enlightenment—would not have been possible.

At the same time, formal education conferred status which enhanced social advancement, and was, consequently, a feature of the region’s social stratification. For example, university training, observed Halperín Donghi about late colonial porteño society,

These sentiments were retained, even while schools and curricula underwent changes following the end of colonial status. The republican rhetoric which came to embrace education as a socially melioristic mechanism masked the widely acceptable notion that the benefits of education to individuals would continue to depend primarily on their socioeconomic origins. This was the value system that in 1825 provided that a widow left alone with six children would have a government-sponsored scholarship for her 14-year-old son, so that he might “be accorded the education to which he is entitled by his distinguished social origin.”⁶ Other parents with high social positions also received public subsidies to support their sons’ schooling. These included notable personalities such as Mariano Vico, the revolutionary army’s surgeon general who had served in Paraguay, the Banda Oriental, and Peru, and Antonio Pirán, former regidor, conciliar, and prior of the Buenos Aires consulado. The relationship between knowledge and class position was instilled in Argentine children early in their lives. We have as an example the lesson taught to youngsters by the principal of the elementary school in the town of San Fernando, who, in 1830, insisted that the best prevention of misfortunes came “by way of study and application in your infancy . . . , guiding yourselves by the irrefutable principle that knowledge enlightens the rich and facilitates the livelihood of the poor.”⁷

The creation and reinforcement of moral and political ideals suitable to the general welfare were added to the objectives of education. The Enlightenment had paved the way for this more generalized perspective by replacing the traditional and authoritarian ideal of the unquestioning subject with the progressive ideal of the participatory citizen.⁸ Such a goal was evident in the actions of General Manuel Belgrano as he founded public schools in the region of Jujuy in 1813, under his military jurisdiction in the northern reaches of the insurgent Río de la Plata. His motive was overtly political insofar as the ultimate aim of education was communal: “to form,” he wrote, “the citizen’s conscience.”⁹ Or, as one publicist of the period put it, the Argentine school was meant to serve as the medium by which “to inspire in children the habit of order, the sentiments of honor, love of truth, the search for justice, [and] respect for their peers.”¹⁰

The political leaders of the early nineteenth century were fully aware of the role that education would play in shaping the political socialization of children: notions related to the education of Argentine youth were formulated increasingly within a generalized concern over the maintenance of social and political stability. Schooling was seen as an instrument capable of engendering the unity of Argentines, a goal which, nonetheless, appeared to elude political chieftains. Ramón González Gorostizu thus referred to the politically salutary potential of education in an address to the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment in Chascomús in 1825, pointing out that Argentines’ inability to form a lasting union and the periodic strife among regions were the result of inadequate schooling. If properly directed, he argued, the efforts of the schools would “suffice to destroy the animosities engendered by ignorance.”¹¹ The pacifying role of education was again expressed, in 1827, by a resident of Buenos Aires who offered the following social commentary regarding the turmoil unleashed by the rebellious Federalists in the country’s interior:

Authorities and gente decente perceived that the educational curriculum was in urgent need of a strengthened moral foundation, so that it might act as a corrective to the political turbulence of the early 1800s.¹³ But the subject of childhood education was, of course, discussed by contemporaries within the context of the social and political values of the dominant groups, who, as custodians of order, formulated the “model” of deferential, even submissive citizenship.¹⁴ The view of the submissive child, in sometimes uneasy combination with the notion of education as preparation for citizenship, was shared by all the elites and crossed the ideological and socioeconomic divisions that otherwise divided them.

From the very start of the independence movement, the revolutionaries had tried to place the system of education within a patently political framework. Schooling became an ideological construct which included both the infusion of political content into the curriculum and the belief —derived from the republican ethos shared by the patriots of 1810—that formal training was a required ingredient in a new, liberal camaraderie. Individual special privileges, including education, which were based solely on social position would come to an end, according to the revolutionaries’ plans. At the same time, the revolutionary leadership in Buenos Aires attempted in the 1810s to foster republican communal consciousness by including documents with ideologically proper content in the array of didactic elements used in the schools. Among them figured a slightly expurgated version of the Social Contract, which was disseminated among the children of the elementary grades.¹⁵ More than a decade later, in 1826, education officials required students on vacation to read the record of the daily sessions of the short-lived national congress so that they “would learn the rationale on which our nation’s constitution is founded.”¹⁶ Political documents quickly became instruments of civic culture, which, once incorporated into the school curriculum, were used to point out the differences with the hierarchical and particularistic privileges of the monarchical regime.

Education became an instrument of nationalism in still other ways. The school regulations drafted by Belgrano in 1813 had called for teachers who should be concerned with instilling in their students

Belgrano’s intent in the country’s northern stretches of Jujuy appears to have taken hold across time and space. Belgrano, who had hoped to instill solidarities between Argentine children and the patria, would have been pleased to read the assignment submitted by a young boy who attended an elementary school outside of Buenos Aires, and who identified himself in a style reminiscent of much of the youth in Paris following the Great Revolution. At the bottom of his worksheet, the boy noted: “This was written by the Ciudadano José Ignacio Villarino in San Fernando on May 14 of 1818.”¹⁸

School Regimen and Curriculum

Schoolchildren in Buenos Aires spent long days learning their lessons. The school day lasted six to seven hours and the school week included Saturdays. In the summer, school was in session from 7:00 a. m. to 10:30 a.m. and from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.; in the winter, morning sessions started one hour later and afternoon sessions one hour earlier. The days were filled with activities related to the basic subjects: reading and writing, grammar and spelling, arithmetic concepts and operations, and catechism.

The school regimen was inflexible and required much patience on the part of the children, who were made to sit idly for hours while the teacher tested the progress of each one. Tomás Ortiz, who taught in the elementary school of the Buenos Aires parish of San Nicolás in 1817, described a typical routine. The morning session would begin with the children attending a 30-minute mass. The next half hour was spent reviewing the lessons of the previous day. Fifteen minutes were then set aside for the sharpening of quills in preparation for one hour of handwriting exercises. Another hour was spent by Ortiz testing the children orally in reading and rules of grammar. The last 15 minutes were spent correcting the written assignments. The afternoon session followed a similar pattern of collective activities and individual testing, culminating in a 15-minute prayer ritual.¹⁹

The typical school day experienced by Argentine children in the first half of the nineteenth century did not allow for much free interplay between teacher and student. There was no such thing as meaningful discussion: lessons were given in unidirectional fashion, supported by a clearly hierarchical system. Information always stemmed from the teachers and was not subject to debate among students; indeed, successful education was deemed to depend more on the teachers’ total domination of the class than on their own mastery of the material.²⁰ Students who questioned the established procedures ran the risk of public humiliation and ostracism. In July 1816, for example, José Gabriel Colina wrote a note to the headmaster of the Academy of Arithmetic in which he announced his intention to quit the school after having been enrolled for only two months. José had taken his examinations, even though he admitted that he had not studied very much; furthermore, he had been at the school only a brief time and could not have prepared sufficiently for the examinations. When he nevertheless received the high grade of “Very Good, ” he began to question the grading and promotion procedures, and even the amount of learning he had been given. “The way things work here,” he wrote tersely, “is that today one copies down the lesson, and if tomorrow he knows it, he then passes, and if he does not know it, he is passed just the same. In the end, I learn nothing. Thus, instead of merely taking up space here, it would be best for me to resign. [In addition], my withdrawal should be interpreted as an expression of solidarity with [Faustino] Lezica [and] Avelino Díaz.” Lezica and Díaz had apparently studied much more and, at least in Colina’s view, had mastered the material better than he had himself; still, Lezica and Díaz had received the lowest passing grade of “Satisfactorio.” The city’s educational administrators reacted to Colina’s “insulting and indecorous” letter by permitting him to leave the school—but only after he was made to “understand the respectful method and form that he should have used to make his request.”²¹

Colina would be taught a lesson which was to take place in several stages. At first, he was sentenced to spend three days in jail, a penalty that was publicized widely so as to alert other students about the consequences of indiscretions of the sort committed by Colina. Not satisfied with handing down the jail term, however, the authorities then began a slander campaign against the young student by methodically attacking his moral and civic character. Felipe Senillosa, the academy’s director, turned over to the authorities documents designed to prove Colina’s poor attendance record for which he had been penalized on three occasions. No one noted the apparent inconsistency between his good grades and his poor attendance. However, Colina’s behavior and subsequent punishments may have succeeded in some measure in rectifying the allegedly unjust grading system, because Faustino Lezica, who had barely passed his midterm exams in May, received the highest grade of “Excelente” during the next examination period, on September 7, 1816. For his part, Avelino Díaz received “Satisfactorio” once again. By then, José Gabriel Colina no longer figured in the class roster.

The two basic instruments of instruction for each subject matter were the monologue and the attendant practice-and-drill session. Because the pedagogical system required a great deal of passivity on the part of the youngsters, students with short attention spans suffered significantly. The curriculum did not yet include specialized content subjects, such as civics or history. Still, children did learn about the past and about Argentine social and political institutions by way of drill in basic skills, especially reading, handwriting, and spelling. For example, a few schools used the first book on the history of the Río de la Plata written after independence, Gregorio Funes’s Ensayo histórico del descubrimiento de las provincias del Paraguay, Tucumán y Buenos Aires. This volume fulfilled both pedagogical and political objectives. Instructors would use the book in dictation, with the goal of teaching spelling and handwriting. The specific passages selected for dictation, however, were designed to inculcate civic culture among the children: to drive home the call for nationalism and patriotism to the young listeners, who wrote down every word enunciated by the teacher as he emphasized the text’s strong anticolonial tones.²²

The “moral education” demanded by critics of the political disorder that was unleashed following the revolution was likewise expressed in handwriting assignments. By 1818, schoolchildren were receiving dictation from their teachers which included maxims on sociability and on social responsibility. For example, José Cainzo, a young boy in the elementary school of the Hospicio in Buenos Aires, turned in the following handwriting assignment:

Handwriting assignments also provided children with instruction in their political responsibilities, as teachers dictated appropriate maxims. A student wrote repeatedly, filling an entire sheet, “Every person must love his country and must do everything on its behalf by being worthy himself.”²⁴

Lessons in civics and history lent themselves particularly well to extolling the revolution’s visionaries, including José de San Martín and Mariano Moreno, and to promoting the values of the politically dominant sectors. The fundamental responsibility of the curriculum, moreover, was to provide the community with young men and women on whom the nation could rely for spiritual and material progress. In this regard, the anticolonial republican ideology held that benefits from personal advancements which were made possible by education must be shared beyond the narrow confines of the private, individual, and familial worlds. In expecting young Argentines to alter the tradition of self-referential calculations, liberal reformers added a novel and divisive ingredient into the realm of education, to the extent that their views challenged the family’s traditional dominance of the child in the formative years.²⁵

The liberal leadership of the autonomous province of Buenos Aires in the 1820s further challenged tradition when it restrained the clergy’s role in education. The religious orders were severely restricted or suppressed.²⁶ When Bernardino Rivadavia ordered the Franciscans to end their teaching functions in 1824, he bore out the fears of traditional families who had long suspected that the liberal state, not the church, would become the dominant factor in the formation and shaping of values among children in an independent Argentina. Rivadavia’s language on this subject was clear:

The reaction was predictable. Traditionalists accused the liberals of undermining the historical bonds between children and their families. Liberals were accused of forming the “Jacobin family,” as Agustín García later expressed it—“the product of a meddlesome state’s intervention in all [domestic] conflicts, which, consequently, weakened paternal authority.”²⁸

Government-sponsored schooling, according to the views of conservatives, threatened to displace traditional community and familial norms. In the revolutionary ideology of Spanish America, republican virtues were public virtues established on the basis of extrafamilial interests: the achievements of the nation’s youth were regarded as the foundation of national progress, not merely of a given family’s welfare. Conservatives’ apprehensions heightened all the more in view of the alien origins of many of the reforms sought by the liberals, imported from England and other cultural environments that were historically antagonistic to the Iberian centralist and hierarchical traditions of learning.²⁹El Censor, one of the city’s liberal weeklies, sought to defend the new departures in the field of education precisely by linking the progress and order found in England with the expanded scope that British leaders gave to schooling. In this connection, it observed,

In the course of the political turmoil that accompanied independence in the Río de la Plata, the very concept of “nation” combined order with deference to authority, two fundamental goals urgently sought by every contender for power in the schismatic Argentina of the 1820s.³¹ Matters related to education and children thus could never stand apart from political or even military affairs. In fact, military commanders would sometimes be charged with educational responsibilities as well: the new commander who in 1821 was placed in charge of the southern town of Patagones had also been appointed by his superiors as the town’s teacher, having been provided with “the most complete training necessary to begin instructing the youth of that important population center.”³²

The linkage between education and the inculcation of political values can readily be seen in the practices which governments followed in appointing members to educational commissions. During the liberal administrations of the 1820s in the province of Buenos Aires, these town and neighborhood school boards were composed of a politically important local functionary—usually the juez de paz—and two vecinos.³³ Appointments to the boards were designed to provide political oversight of educational policy at the local level; and the same practices continued through the conservative era of General Juan Manuel de Rosas during the 1830s and ’40s.³⁴ Moreover, in serving the needs of the strongman Rosas, his minister of government, Tomás de Anchorena, went a step further to instruct the inspector of schools in 1831 not only that school employees must wear the red emblem, symbolic of Rosas’s Federalist party, but also that it became the students’ duty to wear such symbols “while the origins for this determination were made clear to them in a manner calculated to instill love and respect for the [Federalist] system.”³⁵ Indeed, officials felt an urgent need to restore deference to established authority among children, which they perceived to have been lost in the wrong-headed application of unfettered individualism in the early 1800s. As Anchorena expressed it, “[Children] must be educated in accordance to the views and political objectives of the state in order to plant the seed of hope that they will, in turn, support it.”³⁶ Loyalty to the state, however, meant the abrogation of the right to political opinion, for Rosas and his officials were determined to exorcise partisan politics from the schools. In a memorandum the governor circulated among all private and public schools, he warned teachers that no discussion of politics should be allowed by anyone within school grounds. The government even ordered teachers to prevent any political talk by the children outside of the schools, with the expressed purpose of limiting further dissension among Argentine families. The new regulations stipulated that any infraction would result in the immediate closing of the school.³⁷

Although politics and education were closely related in ideological ways, their connection was strained by the state of public finances, budgets tended to provide overwhelmingly greater funding for the military and for the instruments of public order, while relatively little money went to fund educational needs. This fiscal imbalance remained virtually intact until the 1860s.³⁸ Not surprisingly, during periods of turbulence teachers went without salaries for months. And too often, in the frequent political and military crises which dotted the course of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, troops would occupy school facilities, dislodging students and teachers for indeterminate periods.³⁹ Beginning with the defeat of the English troops which invaded Buenos Aires in 1806, the urban militia’s needs were satisfied at the expense of schools; the old Colegio de San Carlos, for example, was turned into military barracks and would not resume its educational duties until 1818.⁴⁰

Similar problems arose in the late 1820s, with the result that (as officials in Buenos Aires reported) schools were “looted horribly by hordes of criminals.” In mid-1829, troops returning from battle were quartered in the elementary school of the parish of La Recoleta. When the city’s director of education protested to the government, he was tersely instructed to find different quarters. Properties to accommodate schools were difficult to find; three months later, the school of La Recoleta was still closed, and the reason was scribbled on the school attendance registers: vacante por falta de casa.⁴¹ At the same time, teachers in San José de Flores and other outlying towns were forced to flee for their lives as advancing troops ransacked and occupied schools.⁴²

A fundamental contradiction had developed in the Río de la Plata between the political elite’s desire for peace and progress and the militarization of society. In the area of education, this contradiction manifested itself even in the nature of prizes that were awarded to primary school children for academic excellence. It was customary during much of the nineteenth century for political and school authorities to hold public examinations and contests, followed by award ceremonies and festivities.⁴³ These public rituals of testing and observation of children’s school performance served as an expression of the state’s asserted concern for education; and they demonstrated the strong nexus that joined the style and content of learning to the political values held by the governing authorities. The examinations of 1816, for example, included the public reading of a congratulatory note which had been sent by the governor to the director of one of the city’s public elementary schools. In the note, the political authorities lauded the director’s pedagogical efforts and the high levels of achievement demonstrated by his students. This time, the coveted prizes consisted of weapons.

Parental Resistance and Hardening of Attitudes

Children’s school attendance and the effectiveness of the training they received were, of course, closely related. In turn, attendance and training were conditioned in part by the socioeconomic positions of their families. Teachers reported that “as soon as parents believe that their children have managed the barest understanding of the first lessons in reading and writing, they resolutely try to remove them from school, depriving the children of the greater enlightenment which could further develop them and raise their general standing in the community.”⁴⁵ In the end, the financial dependence of lower-class parents on their children and the state’s insistence on childhood education combined to create tensions between the private and the public spheres which were never fully eliminated. It remained for a more efficient system of enforcing school attendance at the start of the twentieth century to make compulsory education feasible.⁴⁶ In the meantime, even children fully determined to complete their education ran into disappointing realities as a consequence of economic limitations and parental preferences.⁴⁷

Parental resistance in educational matters was not limited to rural and illiterate fathers and mothers. School authorities and teachers also noted recalcitrance among the gente decente, in reaction to specific educational changes. One of the reforms that raised parental ire was the monitorial system, which represented a significant deviation from the traditional management of the classroom, and was ardently welcomed by liberals in the late 1810s.

This system of schooling, also known as the Lancaster Method, had been pioneered by two Englishmen, Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster. Their system combined progressive didactics, authoritarian rule, and impersonal classroom control.⁴⁸ From the perspective of the authorities, one of the most attractive features of Lancaster’s system was its economy, based on the use of children who, on mastering the material, would take on the role of monitors and then teach other children. These child supervisors were responsible not only for educating their peers, but also for monitoring the children’s behavior and enlisting fellow students in ensuring the orderliness of the classroom. Social control was thus applied on the basis of peer pressure, mediated by the supervision of the school’s inspector, and all within an authoritarian structure which contained the elements of public ridicule for students who broke the rules.⁴⁹ This authoritarian treatment, undergirded by public rituals of punishment, was appealing to Argentine elites spanning a wide ideological spectrum, all equally eager to establish orderliness among the youth and to restore order generally.⁵⁰

Lancaster’s model of instruction was hailed by influential Argentine figures as the greatest and most efficient innovation in the field of pedagogy. It was enthusiastically recommended by the great liberators, Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, to important figures in Buenos Aires, including Bernardino Rivadavia.⁵¹ Other prominent personalities of the revolutionary era, such as Gregorio Funes, also became proponents of incorporating the Lancaster system as a means of cultural liberation from the Spanish intellectual and pedagogical traditions.⁵² By 1819, the first experiments in monitorial education were underway in Buenos Aires. To the enlightened, the system carried the legitimacy of its English origins; to the rational, it offered the scientific design associated with the interrelationships found in industrial systems; to the liberal and the anticlerical, it became positively associated with secularism; and to the authorities—always short of capital—it promised economy.⁵³

Still, reports from teachers and officials noted that parents resisted the implementation of the Lancaster method of teaching, and ignored repeated pleas to give the new system a chance.⁵⁴ Educational reform continued to divide liberals and conservatives, public officials and the citizenry. Traditionalists saw new programs as undermining domestic patriarchal authority: the subordination of the child to the household, both in body and in mind, was to them an essential ingredient of social as well as domestic stability. For their part, educational reformers insisted on the interplay among their stated goals for Argentina: intellectual development, political independence, and general progress. But even among reformers, there was a growing recognition that the revolutionary intelligentsia had failed to impress on the masses their own enlightened and liberal values. By failing to elevate the mass of common people to a significantly higher cultural level, the “doctoral class” had been forced, instead, to descend to the level of behaviors and values of the plebeians. This was the sense shared by many liberals in the 1830s and ’40s.

Among those who, in the second half of the 1830s, discussed their opposition to General Rosas and their plans for a future Argentina, the subject of childhood education held a prominent role. These were liberals of a new, more pragmatic generation, the “Generation of ’37,” whose liberalism was less utopian than that of their ideological predecessors of the revolutionary era. In fact, their pronouncements and actions regarding education and obedience to superiors echoed in many ways the views of the more authoritarian government they opposed.⁵⁵ “From subordination emanates good order,” wrote the most notable of the anti-Rosas ideologues, Domingo Sarmiento, in 1836,

Sarmiento’s liberalism in political matters, although not extended much to children, displayed a mixture of respect for the need of children to be educated with the application of measures which severely restricted their behaviors. His fundamental difference with Rosas was the deeply held belief in the right, indeed, the need for Argentine children to be educated. By contrast, Rosas, the “Restorer of the Laws,” had also restored the anden régime’s view that education was a privilege reserved for the gentry and associated elites. At the same time, precisely because Sarmiento saw in the field of education the root of radical changes in Argentines’ habits of mind, he emphasized the school’s domination over children, looking for it to act as a wedge that would cut through and free them of the regressive social norms represented by their parents and grandparents. Such was, in fact, the contradiction of Sarmiento and other hardened liberals, whose pragmatism arose from the ashes of the military and political conflicts of postindependence Argentina.⁵⁷

The attitude expressed by Sarmiento—coincidentally, the most famous pedagogue of the Generation of ’37—contrasts sharply with the tenets of the generation of liberals who had come to power in the wake of the May Revolution of 1810. Between those optimistic days and the era of conservative authoritarianism represented by Rosas, we can see a significant transformation in the attitudes regarding children and education. The Rousseauist expectation that enlightened education would contribute to the flowering nature of childhood and to the evolution of a society, a notion held by the liberals of the 1810s, became forcefully complemented by the 1820s with the Kantian call for constraint and for the inculcation of habit in the youngsters’ preparation, so that they might follow faithfully the rules of conduct imposed from above.⁵⁸ In this way, the tumultuousness of the independence era gave way to a curious consensus as both reformists and traditionalists came to agree that the supreme guide to life was the law of duty, which was always more or less in opposition to the promptings of inclination.

The evolution of liberal views concerning education could also be seen in the thought of Juan Bautista Alberdi, who observed that revolutionaries like Belgrano as well as the clase ilustrada led in the 1820s by Rivadavia in Buenos Aires “confused education with instruction, the genus with the species [original emphasis].” Never, asserted Alberdi, had the education that Argentines received been adequate to their needs. Education had been based on norms and habits of other cultures and thus was unable to effect changes among the Argentine people, he argued. In sum, Alberdi represented his generation’s disappointment with the entire ideological spectrum of the revolutionary cohort of liberals. Insofar as he shared Montesquieu’s belief in the power of a people’s customs and habits to determine social norms and to condition its laws and constitution, Alberdi considered the Eurocentric expectations by the Argentine próceres of rational, popular voluntarism to have been ridiculously illusory.⁵⁹ Alberdi rejected the first waves of liberal ideology and pedagogy as extraneous to Argentine traditions; hence they failed in molding those traditions into something else entirely. It is in this sense that Rosas, in the eyes of both Alberdi and Sarmiento, gained legitimacy. Alberdi considered Rosas a genuine political prototype, who represented the quintessential emblem of power in Spanish America. For his part, Alberdi would be the emblem of the constitution, “the indispensable means for the transition” from simple power to the law that circumscribes it.⁶⁰

Sarmiento shared Alberdi’s sentiments regarding the opportunities lost by the liberals of 1810 and the 1820s, but concentrated more than his coreligionist on the power classical education would have in shaping the Argentine nation. Alberdi believed in the need for society, through its customs and habits, to define the educational content; by contrast, Sarmiento believed in the enlightenment that emanated from within the political participants of the society. “The republic,” writes Natalio Botana of Sarmiento’s views on schooling,

Sarmiento also devoted considerable time and thought to regulating the behavior of students, providing responses appropriate to every type of infraction.⁶² When he was appointed director of a girls’ school in the province of San Juan in the 1830s, Sarmiento drafted guidelines for the appropriate behavior of children and for the application of corrective measures in cases of infractions. He allowed for six degrees of severity in punishments, ranging from “sweet and loving warnings,” to denials of various privileges, to religious penance, and, finally, to expulsion “in cases of absolute impertinence.”⁶³ No mention was made of paddling or any form of corporal punishment, which Sarmiento, as an ardent believer in the power of moral suasion on children, thoroughly abhorred. Paddling, or azotes, had been repeatedly dealt with by Argentine authorities since 1813 when the practice was first forbidden. In 1815, paddling became permissible once more until the end of 1817, when it was again proscribed. Nevertheless, the actual practice of azotes continued, requiring the Buenos Aires government to decree its abolition yet again in 1819.⁶⁴ Even so, it would remain as a slowly receding residue of an antiquated and more authoritarian educational philosophy. In Ramón Cárcano’s autobiography, the statesman recounted that in 1867, when he was seven years old, his teacher was meting out blows with a hardwood stick on the palms of the children’s hands as a formula for imposing classroom discipline.⁶⁵

An uncritical solidarity with the educational community in which the youngster lived was fostered early as part of the socialization goals Sarmiento had in mind for his students. Here, as in the political realm, the common good and peaceful order were held to depend on deference to the regimen best established within the enclosed world of school. Thus, in Sarmiento’s girls’ school, access to the outside world was severely restricted. The rigid circumscription of children’s social contacts was achieved by actual prohibitions placed on specific activities, and by a very regimented schedule that did not provide much free time. For example, the young women in Sarmiento’s school in San Juan were forbidden to read any book without the prior consent of the headmistress or the director; indeed, they were not even allowed to receive letters from home without permission. No visits were allowed from one dormitory room to another during the hours reserved for studying. Children were never permitted to use familiar pronouns or verb forms, not even with each other, and nicknames were expressly forbidden. No games or pastimes involving physical contact were allowed; no one was permitted near the kitchen or in areas where servants were actually or even likely to be working. Finally, a most generalized prohibition forbade any “indecorous acts or expressions.” Students were warned against recounting at home the punishments meted out by school authorities, or any other event which might have given cause to people in the community to speak ill of the school or of any person involved with it. As Sarmiento noted, “parents would be acting criminally if, in satisfying their own childish curiosity, they were to foment the dishonorable habit of gossip which is found among their children.” In sum, the world of the school and the world of the home could meet only through contact among adults.⁶⁶

Progressive Education and Its Limits

The basic characteristics of the educational system remained largely unaltered until the 1850s. Then changes took place in the school regimen and in the formative experiences of teachers. Even the definitions of childhood—with their attendant epistemological concerns—underwent review. The fall of Rosas, in 1852, provided the opportunity to make such changes, and also to reconsider the function played by the state in matters of education.

Changes in the objectives and styles of education were expressed in the new texts used in Buenos Aires’s schools during the 1860s and ’70s. The new curricula included an Argentine history which deemphasized specific individuals and depersonalized political authority. By the 1860s, the most widely used book on Argentine history in elementary and secondary schools was Historia argentina, written by Luis L. Domínguez.⁶⁷ It contained nearly four hundred pages on the history of Latin America, beginning with Columbus’s voyages, and, in a significant obviation of polemics, ending with the defeat of the British invaders in 1807. In effect, despite its title, the book initiated youngsters into their nation’s past with a literature which culminated on the eve of the independent country. This left much of the republic’s historical facts and interpretations up to the teachers. A similar reluctance to deal with the postrevolutionary era was found in the work of Juana Paula Manso, probably the period’s most influential educator of children. The coverage of her Compendio de la historia de las Provincias Unidas, first published in 1862, began with the sixteenth-century’s age of discovery and settlement, but ended with the formal declaration of Argentine independence of July 9, 1816.⁶⁸

Domínguez’s history reflected the linear version of development among peoples of the world: “[Everything,” it declared, “is logical in the life of every nation, . . . the invisible chain links one cause with another culminating with the final consequences.”⁶⁹ In the prologue to the first edition, published in 1861, Domínguez summarized the perspective held by generations of regional and national leaders on the nature of the fundamental Argentine problem: “[With the Reconquest] begins the era of the Revolution. The Argentine nation thrusts itself in uncharted directions . . . but always firm in the task of resolving the great problem of creating order within freedom” [original emphasis].⁷⁰ Independence, argued Domínguez, was itself the result of the discord generated by the British invasions in 1806, which brought about the dissolution of the bonds among the governing elites.⁷¹

Domínguez’s work retained the traditional characteristics of school texts: great attention to minute details, many dates, birthplaces and life experiences of the principal figures of history, and general tediousness. The text was thus perfectly suited to the evaluation of students on the prevailing index of excellence, memorization. It would not be until the decade of the 1880s that Argentine history texts would be written with a clearly liberal and anti-Rosas slant. The first wave of educational reformers led by Sarmiento avoided any quick revisionism by avoiding the national period altogether, thereby bringing to the students’ consciousness only the abstractions associated with the nation, not its personalities.

Along with new curricular texts, members of the Generation of ’37 also incorporated new ideas about children and their cognitive capabilities. Marcos Sastre was one of the first reformers of nineteenth-century thinking on childhood. Born in Uruguay, he served in 1850 as educational administrator under the regional caudillo Justo José de Urquiza in the province of Entre Ríos. His reforms drew praise from exiled opponents of Rosas, including Sarmiento, who, with characteristic unambiguity, characterized Entre Ríos’s schools as second to none in South America.⁷² Sastre proposed that, in order to mold the future adult citizen, teachers must work with—and not against—the natural inclinations of children, their sense of fair play, justice, and morality. Flaws in children’s characters must be corrected with great prudence and patience. Thus, Sastre would not tolerate corporal punishment, which had continued de facto in much of Argentina despite its legal prohibition. In the regulations he drafted governing the schools of Entre Ríos, he also abolished practices which tended to create a misplaced sense of pride among students, including public awards of prizes such as medals and honorific titles. The new regulations called for awards of books and other objects deemed appropriate for the instruction of children, rather than the prizes which “fomented presumptuousness and pride. ”⁷³

Sastre emphasized that teachers were professionals and required of them both systematic training and consistent application. His regulations called for teaching appointments to be based on examinations and competition. Furthermore, teaching was to be a full-time occupation: no teacher would be permitted to engage in activities unrelated to the education of the children while inside the school.⁷⁴ Finally, Sastre allowed for the notion of a flexible curriculum to accommodate the social and environmental realities of the different communities of children; thus, the curricula of schools in the countryside would emphasize arithmetic skills only up to the basic level, in order to devote more time to matters of greater practical value in the rural setting.

In his advice to teachers, Sastre echoed his predecessors’ call for the establishment of order in the classroom, but from a fundamentally different perspective. Order depended, according to Sastre, not so much on the teachers’ imposition as on their own behaviors. It required their own punctuality and consistency of work. It also required their “incessant vigilance” over the students, but only in order to keep every child occupied with learning activities at all times.⁷⁵ Here stood the contrast between the traditional style that, by insisting on passivity, had engendered resistance and disorder, and the progressive notion that children actively engaged in learning formed the basis for classroom discipline. Thus, memorization was to be minimized.⁷⁶ Sastre and his fellow reformers began the difficult process of educating parents—he often wrote treatises and articles meant to inform the general public—regarding children’s cognitive abilities and emotional needs. Children learn from humiliating words and punishments, wrote Sastre, and grow to imitate such adult behaviors by becoming hypocrites and impudent themselves. Dignity, by contrast, is the essential ingredient of infancy.⁷⁷

Marcos Sastre, together with other precursors of educational reform, also analyzed the political flaws of the Argentine nation and noted the extent to which they were based on educational deficiencies.⁷⁸ The implementation of reforms began generally in 1856, when Sarmiento was appointed to head the Department of Schools of the State of Buenos Aires. Sarmiento introduced the practice of adopting textbooks especially designed for use by children in the process of learning to read and write, and his contributions to Argentine education would earn him a prominent place in all histories of the reforms undertaken by the Generation of ’37. In fact, however, his main talent consisted of identifying and recruiting individuals able to design curricula and implement them in the classroom.

One of the most important of these recruited reformers was Juana Paula Manso, who returned from exile in 1853 to become the most influential of Sarmiento’s education collaborators. Manso’s efforts, however, encountered considerable popular resistance, and she was ultimately forced to resign her position as headmistress of an experimental school in 1865. Among her most progressive (and to conservatives, some of the most alienating) reforms figured coeducational instruction and the education of young children by building on their natural instincts. This philosophy of education expressed the return of Rousseauist principles and reflected a relaxation of the rigid behaviors that had accompanied the period up to the fall of Rosas and his authoritarian conservatism. Manso, a devoted adherent of the educational ideas of Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel, adhered to the theory that children learn best when motivated by impulse and emotion in an environment conducive to learning and “self-activity.” She acted on the notion that children’s minds contained cognitive abilities at virtually all stages of their development. Accordingly, Manso proposed that the teacher be transformed from an authoritarian figure, charged with breaking infantile habits and will, into a pedagogical leader whose goal was to work in concert with the child’s mind. Manso’s views represented an affront to accepted thinking on both childhood and political order, for the notion that adults must work in concert with children’s free will threatened to subvert the centralizing and authoritarian traditions of the past. Educational reformers were planting the seeds of a potentially dangerous revolution with consequences that could jeopardize the position of the old custodial elites: would the coming generations who grew to adulthood under such a subversive system continue to defer to traditional lines of authority?

Froebelian theory drove much of Manso’s thinking on the subject of early childhood education. Froebel, who had died in 1852, only a year before her return to Buenos Aires, considered that play was fundamental to children’s education, from which he derived the idea of the Kindergarten. Its major role was to allow children to learn their place in a wider world of social relations and associated duties. The jardín de infantes in Buenos Aires would instill social skills and a balance between instinct and social preservation or stability. The goal of childhood education was still socialization, only now it contained a double-edged sword—the child’s emancipation, encouraged by spontaneity, and a parallel emphasis on uniformity and control.⁷⁹

Manso also shared the ideas of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. The late nineteenth-century Massachusetts reformer, who similarly followed Froebelian principles, introduced play objects and frolic to the learning environment: “Of the two evils,” she wrote, “extreme indulgence is not so deadly a mistake as extreme severity.”⁸⁰ Manso shared these beliefs and introduced methods that involved play. But to sectors of a porteño culture which had long considered children for their practical value, the apparent “uselessness” of pedagogical experimentation was difficult to accept. The general tendency of the era among both wealthy and poor families was to make an early determination of the occupation that the young boys would pursue, which usually meant following in their fathers’ footsteps. But the reformers encouraged flexibility and experimentation, which inevitably tended to prolong adolescence and might lead to false starts later in life.⁸¹ In the end, however, Manso’s prescriptions did not continue beyond the years of her activity. What remained of the Sarmiento and Manso era were superstructural and organizational reforms; substantive matters of method and epistemological concerns were much slower to sink roots.

The Scope of Education

In 1815, 1,200 students, barely 5 percent of the school-age children in the city of Buenos Aires, attended school.⁸² Only 13 elementary schools served the city, while the countryside had none. Increases in the student population were registered very slowly: enrollments grew by less than 5 percent between 1815 and 1820. Moreover, school registration fluctuated significantly among urban parishes and from one year to another.⁸³ By 1869, the city of Buenos Aires contained a school-age population of nearly 36,000 children. The city’s public and private schools in 1872 numbered 236 and served 7,700 students, slightly more than one-fifth of the school-age population.⁸⁴ By then the budgetary and administrative systems had become considerably more complex, managing a five-tier structure of institutions: 1) municipal schools; 2) provincial schools; 3) educational institutions supported entirely with public funds, but administered autonomously by the Sociedad de Beneficencia; 4) private schools receiving government subsidies; and 5) private schools supported only by tuition-paying students.⁸⁵

Despite the significant increase in the number and variety of schools, a large majority of the children in Buenos Aires either lacked access to education or attended only for a few years. In reviewing the school population figures, government officials in the 1860s noted yet again the relationship between an unschooled nation and political turbulence. The Memoria of the Ministry of Education for 1865 remarked that in Buenos Aires, the best-equipped province, only one child in 25 attended school. What more do we need,” asked the minister of education rhetorically, “to explain our past sorrows?”⁸⁶

Public schools continued to be deficient in instructional tools, books, and surroundings suitable to learning. In considerable part, the racial and socioeconomic conditions of the vecinos still determined the quality of schools, teachers, libraries, and their physical environments. Moreover, despite the increase in the absolute numbers of students, serious deficiencies in attendance remained a problematic legacy of previous decades. The reluctance of parents to send their children to school after the youngsters had completed three or four years of education suggests the persistence of the competition between schools and families of modest means in determining children’s activities.

To judge by the attendance figures, the tension continued between the child’s economic function within the context of the household economy and the state’s demand to socialize children into the national community. Evidence related to the age and gender characteristics noted in the manuscript census schedules showing enrollment and attendance data for Buenos Aires in 1872 indicates that public coeducational schools almost always registered much lower enrollments among boys. Additionally, attrition rates increased dramatically once boys reached the age of 10; indeed, it was not unusual for public schools to have in attendance only girls in the age cohort of 10 to 15.⁸⁷ To be sure, by 1872 the city provided 15 public schools for boys only, which enrolled a total of 1,676 youngsters, but even these schools demonstrated a significant decline in enrollments after the age of 9. In only 4 out of the 15 all-boys public schools did the number of 10- to 15-year-olds equal or surpass the younger age group of 5 to 9. The attrition rate among males above the age of 10, both in the 11 remaining all-boys schools and in all the 35 coeducational public institutions, averaged over 50 percent.⁸⁸

Clearly, the humble porteño family which had internalized the value of education for its children had, on the average, done so on the basis of wishing for a minimum level of literacy for their sons. Once a boy had learned basic reading and writing, plus the rudiments of arithmetic, he was removed from school and made to help in providing for the family’s sustenance. But poor families were not alone responsible for limiting the potential of schools to improve the lives of their offspring. The educational authorities also placed barriers to the development of the gente de pueblo’s children, to judge by the gross disparities in the educational curriculum and environment which black children experienced, compared with their white counterparts. Among the twelve all-girls’ schools operated by the Sociedad de Beneficencia was the Escuela del Rosario, located on Calle Venezuela within the parish of Monserrat, and classified at the time as being a school for the clase de color. Only four subjects were taught at the Escuela del Rosario: reading, writing, arithmetic, and domestic skills. The school was totally lacking in maps, illustrations of plants and animals, three-dimensional geometric figures, blackboards, and books. The school’s two teachers planned their lessons without the aid of any textbooks, which meant that students received the lessons and attendant drill only to the extent that the teachers were willing to create them.⁸⁹

The contrast with another of the schools run by the Sociedad de Beneficencia, also located in the parish of Monserrat but attended by white girls, was dramatic. This was the Escuela de la Parroquia de Monserrat, located on Calle Lorea 149, where the girls learned—in addition to reading, writing, arithmetic, and the predictable domestic skills—geography, history, Spanish literature, French, singing, and the playing of musical instruments. The school had several flat maps and globes, three-dimensional shapes for learning geometry, two blackboards along the walls, and a library containing 150 volumes.⁹⁰ Another case of privileged education beyond the reach of the poor and the nonwhites was Juana Manso’s Escuela Graduada #1, a public girls’ school with a pupil-to-teacher ratio of 12 to 1 at a time when ratios of 60 to 1 were not unusual.⁹¹ In addition, the school served as a training ground for young women studying to become teachers. Manso’s students received the latest style of education, complemented by a full range of didactic materials, including a library of nearly 200 books.⁹² The double standard applied by the educational authorities thus had not changed significantly in the course of the nineteenth century. The words of early nineteenth-century educators retained their essential truth: for the rich, knowledge was meant to enlighten, while for the poor it would facilitate livelihood.

Despite the shortcomings of Buenos Aires’s educational system, certain constructive changes had taken place, and the basis for others was being established. A professional approach to teaching had been institutionalized, complete with its own training facility, the Escuela Normal, the precursor of the higher-level training institution, the Profesorado de Buenos Aires. If some schools lacked textbooks or other instruments and educational materials, at least the principle that didactic tools were essential to learning was accepted, and it would achieve fuller implementation during subsequent decades. And, in the end, the state won out over the recalcitrant parents by establishing the principle of compulsory education, although here again its full execution lagged for quite some years after the enactment of the law in 1884.

At the same time, certain characteristics of the society of old were retained. The school day was still very lengthy: for example, youngsters in the 1860s were attending classes Monday through Saturday, beginning early in the morning and ending shortly before sunset, with a noontime break. Nor did the growing bureaucratization of the educational system eliminate the continued reliance on procedures established at the barrio level. Thus, peer pressure among vecinos continued to be exerted on the subject of public education in the late 1850s as much as before. Such advocacy was channeled through the local or barrio educational boards which continued to be appointed in each parish and through which the city’s highest officials had to work.⁹³ The barrios’ authorities similarly retained the right of nominating local students to be examined publicly on festive days commemorating important events in the nation’s history, typically May 25 and July 9, when the city celebrated the fiestas patrias.⁹⁴ Finally, the old tradition that blurred the line between public agencies and private gain persisted in that membership in the political elite facilitated profits through rental of properties to the Department of Education. The list of owners whose properties were leased by the department included some of the more prominent figures of the city’s gente decente: Dolores de Lezica, Tomás Gowland, Bernardo de Yrigoyen, Zacarías del Mazo, Verea Sánchez de Matheu, José Beruti, and others.⁹⁵

The Triumph of Elite Liberalism

In the end, the elites who navigated the educational system through the course of the economic boom and mass immigration which began after the 1860s would accumulate and centralize authority more efficiently than ever before. They would eventually succeed in eliminating the considerable latitude which had survived in the hands of the barrios through the revolution, the early liberal period of the 1820s, the Rosas years, and the tutelage of the Generation of ’37.⁹⁶ Juan P. Ramos, the federal government’s inspector general of schools in 1910, gave the reasons for the concentration of educational administration in the state’s hands. In his view of the educational regimen which had existed until 1870, the old political elites had been mistaken in their belief that schools could be managed by an administrative system which combined official and popular representation:

Ramos’s analysis in the early twentieth century echoed Alberdi’s nineteenth-century condemnation of the early republicans’ pedagogical philosophies, considered naive in their expectations and sterile in their results. Educational opportunities remained conditioned by longstanding cultural and social prejudices, so that the body of educated Argentines throughout the nineteenth century reflected the privileged socioeconomic position of most students. Moreover, Belgrano’s generation of educational reformers formed the first and only wave of true believers in the eighteenth-century’s meliorism. For those early revolutionaries, education had represented the means to the liberation of every individual of the community in the common pursuit of republicanism; it had been an ideal with lines of thought that led back to the Enlightenment’s optimism about humankind’s political future. But their faith in a universal desire for change and progress suffered the same shattering that European liberals experienced in their own Age of Revolution. The struggles among Argentines engendered by the squabbles among provinces, by the battles between liberals and conservatives, and by the antagonisms between Unitarians and Federalists cast doubt, in the minds of the Generation of ’37, on the concept of continuous progress of the human race to an ultimate perfection.

Asserting the historical continuity of “barbarism” in Spanish America, Sarmiento’s generation of liberals insisted on the need to combat the barbarian side of the human race in Argentina, without which progress would not be possible. The bloody course of the drawn-out revolution in Argentina and much of the rest of Spanish America, together with the subsequent erosion of constitutional ideals, had dramatically demonstrated to those who came to power in the second half of the nineteenth century that in order to eliminate the caudillo political order they would have to eliminate the average Argentines from active participation and force their passivity—in effect, their depoliticization. They were therefore determined to turn the historically problematical masses into passive elements of society.⁹⁸ The hombres de letras could then fulfill their charge of molding the masses in accordance with the elites’ sense of how a civic society ought to behave. Men of ideas would rule by virtue of their tutorial talents, with the added political novelty that education became part of the realm of public action.

The new liberals’ thinking necessarily entailed a significant departure from the revolutionary liberal ideology of the 1810 generation as it concerned education. If for revolutionaries like General Belgrano the classroom had been the cauldron in which the ingredient of fervent republicanism would stir up Americans seeking liberty, for hard-bitten liberals like Sarmiento schooling represented the containment of passion and the instrument for teaching subservience to the state. By the same token, Belgrano’s nationalistic hope for a greater esteem given to “everything that is American was replaced by the admiration for educational and social ideas that emanated from Switzerland, France, England, and the United States. Regardless of political generations, the ultimate goal of education never stood apart from more overtly political matters. But, for the new liberals of the second half of the century, education held the key to the planned elimination of atomized popular loyalties and personalist authority. The end of an Argentina defined as a political construction of hostile regions would be achieved thanks to the efforts exerted by two forces pushing from opposite ends of the societal structure toward a common center. From the top, that is, from the government institutions and the elites, would come the pressures for the citizenry to conform. The dominant groups could execute their plan through organized political parties—clubs, really—and their control of the military prowess capable of eliminating regional dissidents. From the bottom, the masses would undergo a peaceful and long-term program of education, through which generations of youngsters would come to understand political authority as a concept legitimated by the moral superiority of the nation above individual caudillos. Elites had arrived at a lasting consensus about the function of the masses: peace would come from their deferring to those better educated than themselves—not war lords—in the interest of stability.

Author notes