Education for a moral republic: Schools, reform, and conflict in Colombia, 1780--1845

Schools, students, and teachers reflected the shifting boundaries of social, civic, and moral communities in Colombia as the region made difficult transitions from colony to republic. Using sources from the Colombian Ministry of Public Education archives from 1780 to 1845, the study traces the evolution of universal primary education: its early popularity among state agents, its link to liberal ideas of citizenship, and the ways in which it was redeployed by local, non-elite and multiracial actors like teachers, councilmen, and parents. Enlightenment principles of rational reform underpinned education and welfare in the New Granadan Viceroyalty, when monitorial schools grew popular worldwide. ‘Enlightened’ policies laid the groundwork for the later liberal emphasis on schools as the foundation of a virtuous republic. Independence created the aperture within which mixed old and new ideas about hierarchy, morality, and civitas. This study argues that local enthusiasm for, and problems with, state education complicated and reshaped elite concepts of the ‘moral republic’.; Education animated elite and non-elite notions of citizenship, nationhood, social equality, and moral community. By the 1820s, the government aspired to educate the entire, multiethnic population in a dual ethos of political autonomy and moral obligation to uphold the social order. The state set about teaching children to shoulder the civic and moral responsibilities of citizens, even though they might never be enfranchised. While local officials and priests struggled to allocate scarce resources, parents, students, and teachers disputed school taxes, indigenous rights, race-based admissions, ethnic and class connotations of uniforms, and religious curricula. Government instability through the 1840s bruised hopes in public education as a panacea for the country's social ills, but civil conflict also spurred regional interest in education; local school associations flourished. Conservative and liberal elites still balked at revolutionary ideals of republican egalitarianism and resituated citizenship within the privileged sphere of the educated few. Fragmenting national authority and trenchant regional elitism had not vanquished the idea of universal primary education; local actors adopted and redeployed the idea to suit their circumstances.