Education and the State in Modern Peru

Primary Schooling in Lima, 1821–c. 1921

G. Espinoza

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137333032
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: History of Education

Espinoza's work illuminates how education was the site of ideological and political struggle in Peru during its early years as an independent state. Spanning 100 years and discussing both urban and rural education, it shows how school funding, curricula, and governance became part of the cultural process of state-building in Peru.

C H A P T E R 1

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Schooling Patterns

In this chapter I examine changes in schooling patterns within the departamento or region of Lima from the early postindependence years to 1920. Although the primary sources are sparse and sometimes vague, it is possible to establish trends in numbers of public and private schools, enrollment according to type of school, and enrollment in relationship to the school-age population. These variables express the impact of social demand for education and state intervention on schooling. These trends, in turn, were conditioned by population growth, national economic trends, local material circumstances, and patronage.¹ According to some historians, the degree of “social demand” or active demand a society has for education is crucial in explaining changes in the number of schools and enrollment.² This factor has been largely overlooked in the scholarly literature about education in Peru. Other educational historians have argued that social demand cannot be considered a sufficient cause of growing school enrollment. According to these scholars, institutional changes related to the construction of public school systems provided not only a larger educational supply, but also made schooling more accessible.³ In this chapter, I demonstrate that both demand for education and the construction of a public educational system contributed to changes in the numbers of schools and enrolled students, albeit in different moments and at distinctive paces.

In the first four decades after independence and then during and after the War with Chile (1879–1883), the national government could only provide limited funding for primary schooling. Nevertheless, private schools existed both in the urban and rural areas because of the demand for education. Some parents were willing to pay for education, hiring teachers on their own or through their local governments. Not all parents who were interested in educating their children could afford to do so. Hence, when national authorities increased their financial intervention in primary schooling, first in the early 1860s with the opening of municipal schools and later with centralization after 1905, school enrollment grew significantly. Although state intervention in schooling did not create educational demand, it provided opportunities for children who could not otherwise afford to attend schools. Governmental enforcement of school registration and attendance had an impact, albeit a limited one.

During most of the period under study, the region of Lima consisted of the provinces of Lima, Chancay, Canta, Huarochirí, Cañete, and Yauyos. Lima province included the capital city and the nearby semirural districts. The city of Lima was the country’s political center, the largest and most populated urban settlement, and had direct access to the sea through the port of Callao. Economic trends in the capital had an effect on the other provinces of the region which were, by comparison, more rural, less populated, and more reliant on agriculture. As a result, more information exists on schooling for Lima province than for the surrounding ones. In this chapter, I demonstrate how urbanization and commercialization of local economies fostered the growth of educational demand in the Lima region, while simultaneously enduring economic and social inequalities limited its potential impact. In this chapter, I also illustrate how demand encouraged state intervention and how the expansion of public schooling reduced social disparities, albeit to a limited degree. The first part of the chapter examines the city of Lima while the second part is dedicated to the provinces of the region.

SCHOOLING IN THE CITY OF LIMA

The expansion of schooling in Latin America from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries was slowed by economic, social, and political inequalities.⁴ Nevertheless, a degree of social demand for education, especially in urban areas existed, even though students of Peru have paid little attention to it. One way to assess the demand for education in Lima is to look into the evolving number of schools and students. It is important to note that in the early nineteenth century the distinction between “public” and “private” schools was not as clear-cut as it would become later. Sometimes the national government subsidized private schools and other times schools run by political authorities took some fee-paying students, a practice generally discontinued in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁵ For the most part, private schools (escuelas or colegios particulares) depended on the fees paid by students. Hence, the number of private schools provides a sense of the families’ interest in educating their children and their material capacity to do so. Sources disagree over school numbers and there seems to have been a tendency to undercount students. José Gregorio Paredes, who compiled the annual Calendario y Guía de Forasteros de Lima for 1814–1825 and 1829–1839, commonly mentioned an indeterminate number of private primary schools in the capital. Eduardo Carrasco, who published the yearly Calendario y Guía de Forasteros de la República Peruana (1840–1857), occasionally included a disclaimer stating there were a number of private schools he did not mention specifically, because they were of “inferior” quality or had few students. In 1857, the Director General of Primary Instruction Manuel Ferreyros referred to 45 private schools in Lima, while writer Manuel Atanasio Fuentes counted 74.⁶

Table 1.1 shows an inconstant number of private schools from independence until 1860 and a significant increase after the War with Chile. These schools were run by religious orders and private educators, groups that intervened in schooling since the colonial period.⁷ Republican governments had practical and ideological reasons to promote the continuity of this practice. During the postindependence period, when the situation of the treasury was precarious, political authorities expected private initiatives to assume the cost of schooling. The educational intervention of religious orders also was in accordance with the ideal subordination of the Catholic Church to the independent State—an idea that originated in the colonial Patronato.⁸ In the mid-nineteenth century, Conservatives opposed unlimited libertad de enseñanza, or freedom to teach, because they feared Protestant proselytizing.⁹ However, freedom to open schools, teach, and choose school texts and methods, all under certain limitations, was much less controversial. The educational codes issued between 1850 and 1886 established prerequisites to open a private school that were not excessively demanding. The 1850 and 1855 regulations referred vaguely to having sufficient religious, moral, and teaching capacity to establish a school. The codes of 1876 and 1886 required an official teaching license issued by municipal authorities, as well as having a clean and well-ventilated school building.¹⁰

Table 1.1 Number of schools that provided primary education in the city of Lima, 1822–1915

Limited official control and marked social hierarchies made private educational supply flexible and heterogeneous. When a religious community or national or foreign entrepreneur decided there was sufficient demand to open a profitable school, it could be accomplished without major difficulties. The revenue of each private school was determined mostly by its fees and the number of students it enrolled. However, in the early nineteenth century, as mentioned above, a few private schools received subsidies from the national government. Schools varied according to the ages they educated, the subjects they taught, the numbers of teachers and students they had, and whether they were managed by the Catholic clergy. In the nineteenth century, amigas or migas were schools run by older women in their own homes. They took care of young boys and girls and sometimes taught them to pray and read. Escuelas catered to children of school age (between 6 and 14 years) and taught them a variety of primary subjects, sometimes employing more than one teacher. “Colegios” usually taught both primary and secondary courses, had more than one teacher, and took boarding and non-boarding pupils.¹¹ The secondary or high-school level of education was in the process of being defined during the nineteenth century—sometimes it included subjects that were taught also at the college level. Practically, all schools that provided secondary education enrolled primary students as well.¹²

Socioeconomic disparities in schooling were reflected in the wide range of fees that private schools charged, the variety of courses offered, and the fact that parents could choose the subjects their children studied. In 1845, amigas charged between 2 reales and 1 peso, escuelas generally cost 2 pesos, and colegios charged between 4 and 20 pesos according to the classes that students took.¹³ From the 1840s, primary sources reveal intensified educational activity in the city of Lima, evidenced by the arrival of foreign teachers, public criticisms of owners and teachers of rival schools, and the diversification of school subjects.¹⁴ In 1852, parents who wanted their daughters to learn to sing, dance, and play musical instruments at Colegio de Belén were required to make and additional payment on top of the regular tuition.¹⁵ Writer, lawyer, and school-owner Manuel Atanasio Fuentes (1820–1889) criticized the growing diversification of curricula. In 1858, Fuentes claimed that owners and teachers of several schools offered subjects that they were unprepared to teach. A single individual claimed that he or she could teach four or five subjects at the same time.¹⁶ Some years later, Fuentes renewed his criticism, complaining that anyone who fulfilled minimum formal requirements could open a colegio in Lima. Fuentes sarcastically noted that some female colegios had few teachers but offered numerous classes, even managing to organize public examinations that received undue praise in the city’s newspapers.¹⁷

Table 1.1 also shows that the capital city had few public schools until the 1860s when the number increased and remained stable. During the early postindependence decades, the authorities based in Lima had to face generalized political and economic instability, with caudillos constantly fighting over control of scarce fiscal funds.¹⁸ At different moments, regional and local governments were made responsible for funding and supervising public schools, but they lacked financial capacity and had an irregular existence.¹⁹ The Sociedad de Beneficencia Pública de Lima or Beneficencia—a public entity founded in 1825 to manage the charitable institutions that had existed since the colonial period—ran school sections within some of its orphanages and poorhouses.²⁰ The Beneficencia received money from the national government but it also had the properties originally granted to each benevolent institution and gifts from private benefactors. For a brief period, between 1848 and 1850, the national government placed public primary schools in each region of the country under the supervision of the respective society of public assistance.²¹

In the early 1860s, the number of public schools in Lima grew, as shown in Table 1.1. This happened within the legal and institutional framework created by General Ramón Castilla during his two presidential periods (1845–1850, 1855–1862). Castilla’s administrations coincided with the export boom of guano (bird feces used as fertilizer) from 1845 to 1876, which provided the national government with increased fiscal resources. National authorities were able to introduce national budgets in 1846, abolish black slavery and the Indian head tax in 1854, and gradually expand public jobs and pensions.²² The constitution of 1856 reestablished city and town councils, which were closed since 1839. The educational code of 1850 made such councils responsible for opening, managing, and funding primary schools. The national government assumed responsibility for subsidizing new municipal schools when local funds were insufficient. In some towns, the subsidy provided by the national government was the only official money allocated to primary education.

During the 1870s, as international demand for guano declined, the Peruvian economy faced falling revenues, growing foreign debt, and inflation.²³ President Manuel Pardo (1872–1877) and his Partido Civil (Civilian Party) abolished regular subsidies for municipal education. Many district governments in the region of Lima and other parts of the country were forced to close their schools. The municipality of the capital, however, kept the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Schooling Patterns
• 2 From Republicanism to Popular Instruction to Nationalism: Official Educational Ideas and Goals in Peru, 1821–1905
• 3 Teachers, Local Communities, and National Government
• 4 Inside Primary Schools: Curricula and Methods in the Lima Region, 1821–1905
• 5 The Realities of the Estado Docente: Educational Centralization from 1905 to c. 1921
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index