G Men Hoovers American Popular Culture
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The provision for educating the persons was meager and haphazard. Learning was chiefly a privilege consorted the sons of the more prosperous Spaniards, creoles, and mestizos (daughters, of course, were not in general regarded as educable). This restriction of privilege reflected Spain’s exercise at home, where illiteracy was general, and differed only in degree from seventeenth century England, where in all probability not more than a third of the people could read and write. While the Spaniards refused universal education to those of white parentage, they also found solid reasons for withholding it from the Indian and Negro; significant citizens believed that schooling of subject peoples invented subversive thoughts, unbelief in religion, and social commotion. As a result, Spanish America was largely illiterate at the end of the colonial period. Jose Ingenieros, the Argentine social historian, puts the figure for illiteracy in the area of La Plata at 99 per cent. The circumstance was better in Mexico. An primary element in the popular schooling of Spanish Americans was the generous importation of books from the mother country. Fiction and nonfiction, some of it trash and a heap of of it of severe worth, found eager readers in the overseas kingdoms. These books in Castilian fixed that tongue upon all of Spanish America. Although Basques, Catalans, and Galicians were numerous, they were forced to read Castilian, which became the universal language of Spanish America to a much dandier degree than it was in Spain. An early crusade to broaden the base of education was made by the Franciscans in Mexico with the help of Viceroy Mendoza. They believed that sound schooling would lift the Indians to an appreciation of Spanish culture. Pedro de Gante, a Flemish Franciscan, conventional the firstborn school for Indians at Texcoco in 1523. He directed the school for more than forty years, enrolling each year from 500 to 1,000 Indian boys; he taught them Spanish and manual arts, and trained them as artists and artisans for the decoration of the churches. Other schools were coordinated for sons of Indian chieftains, still others for Indian girls in preparation for motherhood. In 1547 Viceroy Mendoza founded the school of San Juan de Letran, where unclaimed mestizo children were entrusted to the Franciscans. This school, early supported by the sale of wild cattle, had an unbroken history of more than three centuries. Similar schools, though less successful, were coordinated in Lima. Such ventures provoked the fears of landholders and a heap of churchmen (especially the Dominicans), who opposed them as corrupters of the Indian. These experiments in standard education were in general abandoned by the end of the sixteenth century, and schooling was fixed chiefly to the sons of privileged fan lilies. Spain’s most discerned contribution to education in the colonies was the university: she founded ten major and fifteen minor foundations of higher learning for the duration of the colonial period. They were chiefly modeled after the venerable University of Salamanca. In the thirteenth century Salamanca had ranked with Paris, Bologna, and Oxford as one of the four chief centers of learning in medieval Europe. By the mid sixteenth century, Salamanca had reached it is biggest glory, with some 7,000 students enrolled from all Europe. Its charter and a good deal of immunities made it all but independent of kings. It had an almost international reputation and brought Spain enviable prestige allround the world. Second only to Salamanca in influence upon American instructional life was the University of Alcala de Henares, founded in 1498 by Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros. The founding of Spanish American universities begun in 1551 when Charles 1st authorized the creation of “royal and pontifical” universities in Mexico and Lima and granted them charters patterned after that of Salamanca. The University of Mexico opened it is doors in 1553, that of Lima in 1572. These two originations were the chief inspiration to the other universities which sprang up over Spanish America. Of the twenty five dandier or lesser foundations coordinated by the end of the eighteenth century, those indicated “royal and pontifical” were creations of the Crown and the others were founded by the Church. All were overshadowed by the clergy and were, at least until the eighteenth century, little more than training schools for priests just as Harvard and Yale were devoting themselves to the training of Protestant clergy. Each university was controlled, as in Spain, by a faculty made up of professors and resident scholars. The rector, or president, held a position of much honor but received no salary; he was ordinarily elected every year and seldom served for more than two years. The university community many times lived beneath it is own laws and administered justice to it is members. At times a lot of universities dropped racial and class bars and admitted a few Indians and an occasional mulatto. Under the eighteenth century Bourbons, lines were tightened and enrollment was fixed to those who could prove “purity of blood.” The routine costs of instruction were low, but the fees and incidental disbursements of acquiring degrees were enormous, occasionally aggregating assorted thousand dollars. The University of Mexico reached the most eminent distinction in university education in the seventeeth century. At that time it boasted twenty three chairs (catedras, platforms), the majority in theology and canon law, and others in medicine, surgery, anatomy, astrology, rhetoric, and the Aztec and Otomi languages. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the university was graced by the chief intellectual of the Spanish colonial period, Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora, for twenty years it is professor of mathematics. Siguenza was mathematician, critic and poet, astronomer and historian, archaeologist and philosopher. A innovative Spanish scholar writes of him: “The aspect of such a man in the days of Charles 2nd is sufficient to exalt a university and a country, and is proof that the shadows of ignorance in which we had enveloped our colonies were not so thick nor was the predominance of theology in the schools which we founded there so despotic.” Siguenza’s restless search for truth, his empirical method, his ranging versatility, all set their stamp upon the university and won it acknowledgement in Europe as well as in America. The effectiveness of the Spanish American universities was uneven: numerous had periods of distinction; others were never more than mediocre training schools for priests; still others were little more than secondary schools. Despite their generous charters, they were all at respective times subject to the interference of royal officials. The University of San Marcos in Lima, earlier a center of vigorous intellectual life, by the middle of the eighteenth century had become according to one Peruvian historian “an institution for strictly literary exhibitions without severe study in any departments.” They all shared one mutual weakness: faculties were recruited chiefly from among members of the religious orders, the professors devoting only a few hours each week to their students and receiving trifling fees. In naming instructors and in ordering the curriculums, there were intermittent disputes among the rival religious orders and, in the eighteenth century, amid ecclesiastical and secular factions. Faculties were underneath ceaseless pressure not only from civil authorities, but from successful men of business; time and again they found it expedient to concede degrees to despicable men. There was a quickening of university life by the close of the colonial period. Ecclesiastical control was yielding to secular. Scientists were speaking their minds with unaccustomed freedom. Exponents of new philosophical trends, influenced by the French Enlightenment, were making themselves felt. Mexico now unquestionably led the intellectual life of the colonies. Mexico’s School of Medicine was founded in 1768. Her Botanical Gardens for scientific study of plants and flowers were laid out in 1788. The Mexican School of Mines was organized in 1791. |
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