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APR 9 1

[Committee for the study of educational conditions
in Mexico]
A study of educational conditions in Mexico.
Cincinnati, 19 06. __________«

Mexico
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•YAILJE-MMPPEISSirinr-

Gift of
Prof. Irving Fisher
19 V^

A STUDY OF
EDUCATIONAL CONDITIONS
IN MEXICO
AND AN APPEAL FOR AN
INDEPENDENT COLLEGE

A STUDY OF
EDUCATIONAL CONDITIONS
IN MEXICO
AND AN APPEAL FOR AN
INDEPENDENT COLLEGE

CINCINNATI, OHIO
PUBLISHED FOR THE COMMITTEE
1916

Copyright, 1916, by
The Committee for the Study of Educational
Conditions in Mexico

COMMITTEE
FOR THE STUDY OF EDUCATIONAL
CONDITIONS IN MEXICO

Norman Bridge
Los Angeles, California
Frank J. Goodnow Baltimore, Maryland
David Starr Jordan
Palo Alto, California
Harry Pratt Judson
Chicago, Illinois
Henry C. King Oberlin, Ohio
Samuel C. Mitchell Newark, Delaware
John Bassett Moore
New York City
Arthur W. Page Long Island, New York
Theodore H. Price
New York City
Leo S. Rowe Philadelphia, Pennsylvania •
George B. Winton Nashville, Tennessee
Charles William Dabney, Chairman
Cincinnati, Ohio

CONTENTS
Chapter Page
Foreword  5
I. Racial Setting  7
II. The Colonial Period  17
III. Period of Political Liberation  24
IV. Conditions at Beginning of Independence  27
V. Education Under the Republic  32
VI. Developments from 1821 to 1867  40
VII. Later Phases — School Organization  61
VIII. Additional Topics  86
Afterword  91

FOREWORD
IT is fair to say that everyone wants to help Mexico, but
that no one at present knows how to do it. We can not
expect to help her effectually until we first understand her
history and institutions, her people and their aspirations.
What, then, does the history of Mexico teach us? What is
the meaning of the series of revolutions which have been going
on in that country for the last hundred years? In other
words, what have the Mexicans accomplished, and what do
they now want? These revolutions, including this last long one,
have all, at bottom, been phases of a blind, misguided struggle
of a strong, ignorant people for liberty. They have sprung
from a desire of the common people to realize the benefits of
democracy. They have been a struggle against a feudal
system approaching slavery. They were chiefly, although
not entirely, the strivings of an oppressed people to win for
themselves and their children a small place upon the soil of
their native land.
These blind efforts have failed of their ends largely because
the people have been without learning and without true leaders.
There has never been a middle class in Mexico to supply
leaders for the people in their struggles with the feudal lords.
Organized public opinion is the only basis for democratic
government, and this has never existed in Mexico. The only
newspapers are controlled by the Government, by the land
lords, or by the big corporations. There are no real political
parties. The only politics are wholly personal, and the only
political organizations are gangs formed to advance the interests
of leaders whose names they bear. There are no political
campaigns to educate the voters, but only processions and
rallies intended to impress them. There is, in fact, no free
political discussion of any kind. Elections in Mexico, con
sequently, are either farces or frauds.
Organized public opinion and the free discussion of political
affairs so necessary to free government can not exist where the

masses of the people are ignorant. The only solution of the
Mexican problem, therefore, will be the establishment of
public schools which will educate the people to know their
rights, and of colleges to train men to help them in their strug
gles to win those rights.
In the belief that the best thing the friends of Mexico can
do at the present time is to prepare to assist her in educating
her people, a Committee was formed a year ago for the purpose
of studying the educational conditions and needs of the country.
The following paper was prepared under the direction of this
Committee by Dr. George B. Winton (now of Vanderbilt Uni
versity, but for thirty years a teacher in Mexico), with some
assistance from Professor Andres Osuna, formerly superin
tendent of schools of Coahuila and at present general director
of primary, normal, and preparatory education in the Federal
District of Mexico. Several of the notes were contributed by
Professor Ezequiel A. Chavez, formerly President of the
National University of Mexico and Assistant Secretary of the
Department of Public Instruction. We are indebted to
Professor I. J. Cox, of the University of Cincinnati, for revising
the material thus collected and contributing additional matter. *
For those who can not read the whole paper at once, the
chapter summaries and "Afterword" will, we hope, prove
helpful in giving a general view of the educational conditions
in Mexico and our recommendations for their improvement.
CHARLES WILLIAM DABNEY, Chairman.
Cincinnati, Ohio, December 1, 1916.

?Notes contributed by Professor Chdvez are signed "E. A. C"; those by Professor Cox,
"I. 3. C."

I — RACIAL SETTING
Summary
Conditions in Mexico cannot be understood without a study of ethnology.
The Nahua peoples— Toltecs, Chichimecs, and Aztecs— came from the north
by the west, and displaced an earlier race, perhaps the Mayas. The Nahua
records were destroyed by the Spaniards; but we suppose their origin to
have been Asiatic. They are oriental in type of mind and in physique.
The Aztecs were the leaders for only a century or two. As a warlike tribe
they developed a system of bloody religious rites. It was not really typical,
as Mexicans are not sanguinary in their tastes. The line between "nobles"
and "plebeians" was the most noteworthy social phase of native life. Agri
culture flourished. The Conquest introduced new racial influences and
two new classes, mestizos and Creoles. The Spanish settlers took possession
of people and lands. Education was left to the Church. Doubt was
entertained at first whether the Indian could be educated. There was no
attempt at education by the Government. The Spanish Crown and the
superior authorities in the Church made provision for the protection of the
Indians. These measures were brought to naught by the avarice of the
colonists. Repartimientos and encomiendas were intended for the good of
the natives, but resulted only in their oppression and the enrichment of
the colonists.
ANY study of educational conditions in Mexico must
take account of the racial history of the Mexican
people. Not only is that history without a parallel,
but there is no phase of the people's life that does not throw
the student back upon the extraordinary intermingling of
race currents at and before the Conquest, and the influence
which those currents have exerted upon each other and upon
the mass during the succeeding centuries. The ideals and
practices for the training of the young, which have prevailed
during the six centuries of Mexico's recorded history, have
been the outgrowth of the social, military, and governmental
standards existing first among the native tribes, and later
modified by the coming of the Spaniards. A rapid review of
these racial elements and tendencies will serve, therefore, to give
the setting for our examination of the present educational status.
The Nahua peoples, who displaced an earlier stock — believed
by many to be represented now by the Mayas of Yucatan and
7

Central America — had been in possession of the Mexican
plateau, according to their own records and estimates, some
six or seven centuries before the coming of the Europeans.
They had themselves arrived in three successive migrations,
or had, at least, been dominated by three successive groups or
tribes---the Toltecs, the Chichimecs, and the Aztecs. The
Aztecs were in power at the time of the Conquest. Vigorous
tribes of cognate stock lay just outside the sphere of their
control — the Tarascos, the Huastecs, the Mixtecs, the Zapotecs,
and others.*
On this question of oriental origin a word or two may be
ventured. While the elaborate theories and speculations
which have been a favorite diversion of students of Mexican
history are in the main far from convincing, one must allow
that there is much in the way of justifiable inference pointing
to an Asiatic origin for these peoples. The physical
resemblance which is still marked and detailed, is re-enforced
by mental and spiritual traits suggesting, let us say, a kinship
between the Mexicans and the people of Japan or of China,
rather than with any race of Europe. | It is scarcely too much
to say, indeed, that one outstanding phase of Mexico's long and
tragic history, has been the inability of the European mind to
sound the distinctively oriental processes of Mexican thinking.
To this day there is an ever-present menace of tragedy in the
forced contact of the American people, intellectual heirs as
they are of Northern Europe, with the Mexicans, whose
aboriginal orientalism was but slightly tinctured by contact
with Spain, and that at a time when Spain herself had for
centuries been sitting at the feet of Arab schoolmasters. The
writer of these lines is beset by daily reminders, spread before
us in the pages of American periodicals, of the inability of
Americans to understand Mexico and the Mexicans. It is

*The statement that Toltecs, Chichimecs, Aztecs, Tarascos, Huastecs, Mixtecs, Zapotecs,
and others were tribes of cognate stock is, perhaps, questionable. Distinguished scholars
have reached the conclusion that the term "Chichimecs" was a word used only for characterizing
a cultural stage. — E. A. C.
fThe Japanese and Chinese are very dissimilar peoples, considered ethnically, bo this kin
ship can be suggested merely for comparative purposes. There is absolutely no evidence of
any direct connection between either the Chinese or Japanese and the Mexicans. It must
be noticed, besides, that there are in Mexico many ethnical groups of different Indians, and
that to this day the mental traits of all of them are a subject only of literary discussion, not of
scientific definition. — E. A. C.

so grotesque that it is comic, yet behind the mask of Comus
grins still the threat of tragedy.
The Mexicans resemble physically the Japanese. They
have the small feet and hands, the long bodies, the wide faces
and prominent cheek bones, which mark the people of Nippon.
Along with these physical resemblances may be traced moral
likenesses. There is in the two people the same astounding
indifference to death; in both may be found the same mixture
of gloomy fatalism and childlike good cheer, the same easy
complaisance coupled with invincible obstinacy, the same
subtle unanimity in their mental processes, invisible and
incomprehensible to the onlooker, the same estheticism and
warm-heartedness linked with childish ferocity, the same
unbending and deathless loyalty. The question is often asked
whether the Mexicans are not "very treacherous." The
suggestion is ridiculous. They are almost criminally loyal.
The hegemony of the Aztecs was a matter of two or three
centuries, more or less, preceding the advent of the Spaniards.
They had forced themselves to the front by sheer fighting
ability. Once a weary and dilapidated tribe, they had found
refuge on a rocky island of the salt and marshy lake of Texcoco,
where for a time they eked out a scanty subsistence by fishing,
hunting, and marauding. When later their numbers had
increased, and they had grown skilled in arms, they overthrew
the pacific agriculturists round about them and came to
dominate the whole beautiful valley. Their warlike life begat
a bloody religion, and the worship of Huitzilopochtli, God of
War, culminated in human sacrifices — of captives only, at
first — and cannibalism. This, though a recent and localized
development, impressed itself so on the European invaders
that it has ever since colored the conception of the Mexican
national character entertained throughout the world. The
fact is that the great mass of the Mexican peoples were neither
warlike nor bloody-minded, and their religions were agricultural
and pastoral in type, far removed from the sanguinary cult
of the Aztecs. Indeed, the very fact that the Mexicans in
general were farmers and artisans rather than warriors accounts
for the sudden rise to power of the Aztec tribe. Some similar
phenomena must be the explanation of the hastily abandoned

granaries, houses, and irrigated fields throughout Arizona and
New Mexico.
As is usual in such cases, the Aztec conquerors absorbed
much of the culture of the peoples whom they dominated.
They learned the art of stonework and woodwork, of archi
tecture and city planning. They received the benefits of the
expert farming already developed by their predecessors, the
planting and cultivation of corn, beans, potatoes, etc., and
the reduction of grains to food; also those of the weaving of
cotton and other fibers into cloth, of skilled labor in gold,
silver, and copper, of fine arts in feather-work and hieroglyphic
writing. All these, there is reason to believe, originated before
the time of the Aztecs* of Tenochtitlan, though naturally the
Spanish invaders attributed all that they discovered to the
people whom they found in power.
This, then, is the situation which faces us at the beginning
of our definite knowledge of Mexico. On a high, healthful,
and fertile plateau, in the heart of which is a beautiful basin or
valley, adorned with jeweled lakes and watched over by sentinel
mountains, two of them capped with perpetual snow, has been
gathered a group of tribes, henceforth to be known (through
mistaken geography) as "Indians." They are in the early
stages of civilization, beginning to cultivate the soil, to build
villages of the communal type and to organize governments.
Divided into jurisdictions that were primarily tribes, they are
yet with a few exceptions racially homogeneous. Then-
several languages are nevertheless distinct from each other,
and their separate governments of varying form. They are in
a chronic state of antagonism and jealousy among themselves,
which often breaks into warfare. Together they make a
population variously estimated at from two to four millions.
Although the tribes differed largely among themselves in
the matter of social standards and customs, they were all
pervaded by one or two aspects of community life. Of these
the most important was the line drawn between nobles and

*It is doubtful whether the aborigines of Mexico are racially homogeneous. The physical
type of the oldest of the tribes, the Otomies, is totally different from that of the Yaquis, the
Zapotecs, and the Mayas. Moreover, the linguistic differences are considerable. The language
of the Otomies is monosyllabic; that of the other tribes was in the agglutinative period, yet
passing into the period of inflexion. — E. A. C. ^ ,'"'*-¦.
10 •»

people. Despite the frequent descriptions and expositions of
this social system in which the writings of the chroniclers
abound, it is difficult now to trace the conceptions out of which
it had grown. It appears to have been a fairly normal case of
feudalism, that state of society likely to supervene during the
transition of any people from warlike maraudings to settled
agriculture and mechanic arts. The war chiefs come to the
front through skill in fighting. Their followers in battle
remain loyal when the fighting ceases. If they begin to desire
lands and villages and strongholds, the chief and his vassals
aid each other to secure them. Within a generation or two
there is developed an hereditary chieftainship. Then there
remains but a step to the permanent distinction between
noble and serf.
Some process like this has evidently taken place in Mexico.
The event discloses that there was no real foundation for the
distinction. The caciques were in no essential point superior
to or even different from the macehuales. Yet since the dis
crimination was quite in line with what the Spaniards were
used to at home, they accepted it as vital and final, and it
exercised a far-reaching influence on social institutions long
after the Conquest.
As one result of the work of early missionaries among the
people of Mexico, a considerable group of native scholars and
writers grew up. These men, masters at once of their own and
the Spanish language, took great pride in expounding the
institutions, customs, history, and glories of their people.
With them collaborated not a few of the missionaries, men who
had come to understand something of the significance of the
native culture, and even to have some measure of tolerance for
the native religion. They admitted, at least, that many of the
acts of worship belonging to it were of themselves innocent,
and they allowed their converts to bring with them into the
Christian temples the garlands and dances and music with
which those converts had once honored the gods that had been
displaced. It is interesting to observe that these native
scholars were quite as apt to represent plebeian blood as noble
blood, despite the fact that never, to this day, in Mexico, have
n

the sons of the common people had equal opportunity with
those who were looked upon as of better birth.*
No phenomenon of the social history of Mexico so constantly
impresses itself upon the student's attention as this discrimina
tion against the lowly born. Yet nothing is plainer than that
there is no physical or moral or intellectual factor in the life
of the people themselves that justifies it. It was, nevertheless,
both before and after the advent of the Spanish, a stubborn
fact — often a bitter and an unhappy one. It has left traces
in the national character and raised barriers in the national
life that have not disappeared to this day. How it affected
educational undertakings will appear later.
Following the Conquest there were social developments
quite as significant in their future influence as was the pohtical
change from autonomy among the native Mexican tribes to
government by representatives of the Spanish Crown. For
almost a generation after the final victory of Hernando Cortez
in 1521 there was no immigration of Spaniards except soldiers
and friars. Nothing was more natural than that the soldiers
should form alliances with the Mexican women. These were
largely women of the plebeian class, and the majority of such
unions were irregular. At once there was thus added to the
existing population a new element, the mestizos, or mixed-
bloods, children of Spanish fathers and Indian mothers. With
in another generation, when Mexico became a field for invest
ment in mines, plantations, and stock ranches, instead of
simply the arena for the exploits of soldiers or the diligence
of missionaries, there commenced a more orderly immigration.
Spanish citizens arrived, bringing their families. They came,
usually armed with concessions granted by the Crown, prepared
to take over native lands and mines, and with them native
miners and farmers. The children that were born of these
Spanish parents added still another clearly defined strain to
the population, the Creoles (criollos). (In English usage this
word is often wrongly taken to mean the same as mestizo.
It means American born, of European parentage.)

The records of Mexico from the time of the political independence do contain, to be sure,
names of Indians of pure blood who rose from obscurity to high positions as ministers, generals,
professors, deputies, and even presidents of the Republic. Among the best known of these
names are those of Juarez, Mejia, Mendoza, Altamirano, and very recently Huerta. — E. A. C.
12

Such was the Mexican population at the beginning of modern
Mexican history. Consisting originally of various related
tribes, made up of nobles and plebeians, it had injected into
it the Spanish conquistadores and their successors, the non
descript mestizos, and the proud Creoles. The Spanish invaders
themselves were of various classes, but the opportunities of
the New World were so many, and its fields of exploitation so
wide, that all those who showed any aptitude, whether for
politics or business, were able soon to place themselves in posi
tions of advantage. The distinction between noble and serf is
everywhere but skin deep, at best, and is easily rubbed out
when circumstances are against it. The Spanish soldiers were
mostly illiterate peasants. In their contact with the proud
and disciplined Indian chieftains they often appeared at a
disadvantage. Yet by the power of arms and later of wealth
they soon came to be the aristocracy of the New World.
Of interest to our purpose is the attitude toward these
various strata of early Mexican society assumed by two groups
of the Spaniards, the governing class and the teachers. The
alliance between the government then existing in Spain and
the authorities of the Catholic Church was a very close one.
By common consent the work of educating the new subjects
was left to the representatives of the Church. One historian
says very bluntly that this was inevitable, since none of the
other Spanish immigrants were capable of teaching them
letters. This is rather severe, but that the soldiers were
mostly illiterate is not open to doubt. The same writer
(Icazbalceta) adds that the income of the Government was not
sufficient to enable it to establish a system of public schools.
On this point his accuracy is less self-evident.* The speed
with which the governing class enriched themselves would
indicate that the country did not lack in productiveness.
The Crown revenues, however, suffered from a defective system
of taxation. From the very beginning a head tax had been
laid upon the Indians. The Spanish colonists managed usually
*If a system of public schools was not established by the Spanish Crown, the fact must be
explained by other reasons than those here suggested. "The primary or elementary school,"
says Butler, "springing as it does from needs and ideas that are comparatively modern
seems but a creature of yesterday." Properly speaking we can say that only during the
nineteenth century has education "definitely become a state function." — E. A. C.
13

to evade such taxation, even after they had become land-owners
and exploiters of the wealth of the country. It was still the
Indian — the poor man — who carried the load; nor is this
condition of things yet properly remedied. Senor Ezequiel
Chavez, quoting the study of Don Pablo Macedo on the
evolution of Mexican finance, makes the statement that the
annual income of New Spain, during the latter period of
Spanish control, reached $20,000,000. At least two-fifths
of this, probably a half, was sent to Spain.
In the matter of colonial administration there was remark
able unanimity between the political and ecclesiastical author
ities in Spain. The Crown usually accepted the suggestions
of the Church in regard to the treatment of the native peoples
of the New World. The authorities of the Church, however,
from the Pope down, while moved by benevolence and a
sincere philanthropy, were often so far afield in their under
standing of conditions among the Indians that their disposi
tions are a queer jumble of beneficent and disastrous provisions.
The spiritual status of the low-class Indian was often solemnly
discussed. Soldier and missionary alike doubted whether he
was, properly speaking, a soul, a rational being. This doubt
persisted so long that it crystallized into a phrase. Spaniards,
Creoles, Indian caciques, and most mestizos were spoken of as
gente de razon (rational beings), a class from which indigenas —
just plain Indians — were by inference excluded. This sixteenth
century psychology has in it a touch of humor, but the scholars
of that day took it in all seriousness. It certainly was serious
enough for the Indian, for it affected, as we shall see, the
provisions that were made for his education, and the system
of education thus early introduced affected the whole sub
sequent history of the nation.*
While in home affairs there was usually harmony between
the political and ecclesiastical powers, friction often arose
between their American representatives in the application of
orders from Spain. The secular Spaniard, whether an office
holder or a soldier, although usually a devout Catholic and
desirous of Christian converts, was primarily interested in the
*The Bomewhat exceptional ability of many Indians for learning was, however, clearly
recognized from the very beginning of the Colonial period by such acute observers as Fray
Gerunimo Mendieta. — E. A. C. 14

search for gold. The resources of Mexico (New Spain, it was
called) were so fabulous, and riches often came with such ease
and suddenness, that men became drunk with greed. This
avarice astonished the Indians, and was at times the occasion
of sarcastic comment. The plans of the Government, advised
by the Church authorities, looked primarily to the Christianiz
ing of the native peoples of Mexico. But in the hands of the
colonial administrators and settlers, these plans were often
distorted to serve the most selfish interests. If the royal orders
were that the lands should be divided among those who had
merited well of the Crown, the native people were seized along
with the land, and made to work for the new "owner" in
virtual slavery. Thus repartimientos were abused, and the
system had to be abandoned. If a large land-owner had
"commended" to him a certain number of Indians, that he
might civilize and Christianize them, he promptly enslaved
the whole lot, binding them as serfs to his land and preventing
them from leaving as long as they were in debt. Thus the
encomiendas were abused. More than one effort was made to
abolish the system. Enlightened missionaries thundered
against it. Even viceroys condemned it; and from time to
time royal decrees were launched against it. But it was most
profitable to the colonists. Many of them were far in the
interior. Not seldom the monks themselves were brought to
think well of the situation. Were not the Indians submissive?
Had they not all received baptism? What could be safer for
them than humbly to take the secular as well as the religious
orders of their superiors? As for working, that was also good
for their souls. Left to themselves they would loaf and
gamble and fight.
So the encomiendas persisted — in fact, if not in name. The
lot of the subjected masses was not called slavery. Men and
women were not bought and sold — at least not usually. But
they belonged body and soul to the men from over the sea.
They were helpless. Their paternal lands had been taken
from them, and they had become serfs, if not chattels. Their
weakness made resistance of any kind impossible. Their very
language faded out, except in secret discourse, and their tribal
organizations disappeared; and in all the fertile and desirable
15

sections of their country they settled down to three hundred
years of ignorance and peonage. Some results of this system
our further studies will disclose.*

*The condition that succeeded the encomiendas may be termed a very bad form of servitude
de la glebe, yet it was better than actual slavery. But there are too many differences in the
character of individual landlords and in the physical conditions of different areas to make an
accurate designation possible. Considerate proprietors maintained their haciendas under a
mild paternal regime, side by side with those of a more abusive type. Among such benevolent
owners we may mention the renowned Don Melchor Ocampo, late of the state of Michoacan,
and Don Olegario Molina, of Yucatan. The benefactions of the latter, according to a con
temporary, should be commemorated by a public monument. There are many others of Uke
character. Moreover, in some few localities — Xochimilco, for instance — the Indians retained
individual land holdings. — E. A. C.

16

II — THE COLONIAL PERIOD
Summary
The early mission work was done by monastic orders, and was educa
tional. They debated how much to teach the Indian. The missions were
at first attractive and useful establishments. The mestizos increased the
number of the lower class, especially in cities. Schools were established to
meet the needs of various classes. A university was provided as early as
1551. The Jesuits came in 1572, and soon engaged in educational work.
Various institutions followed.
THE work of education in the new world was given over,
as pointed out above, to the Church. In Mexico this
meant the monastic orders first, chiefly the Franciscans,
the Dominicans, and the Augustinians; later came the Jesuits.
The missions established among the Indians by the monks of
the sixteenth century were largely established for teaching.
Nothing else, indeed, was possible. These people needed to
learn everything. Some of them were, in their way, not bad
farmers. But the coming of the Europeans had introduced
farming implements, domestic animals, fruits, vegetables, and
grains not before known, about which the Indian had to be
informed. Most important of all, he needed to be taught
Christian doctrine. He did not need a great deal of this, to
be sure, to induce him to accept baptism. That seemed to
him a rite innocent enough — a good deal like some of those
employed by his own religion. Just what mental reservations
he might entertain did not greatly concern the average simple-
minded monk. He believed in the efficacy of baptism, ex
opere operato, and had no doubt that a soul was redeemed for
heaven each time that he administered the rite.
Just how much of letters should be taught in these mission
schools was a subject of prolonged study and sober discussion.
The issues involved were of this sort: Can the Indian with
his limited intelligence understand letters? (Facts based on
experience soon put this question out of court, though at first
it was given great weight.) Again: Of what use will a knowl
edge of letters be to him? will it not endanger his soul by
17

teaching him to think and thus to be less submissive in matters
of doctrine? will it not make him dissatisfied with his lot, and .
less desirable as a laborer? This question the land-owners
and mine masters urged with an insistence that is perfectly
intelligible. Further, why should the common Indian wish
to read unless he was to pursue his studies in higher schools?
That, of course, was out of the question. He could not be
allowed to study theology, for its mysteries were not for such
as he. If he learned jurisprudence, it would certainly give
him grounds for dissatisfaction with his social and economic
status. As for philosophy, it was inconceivable that people
so new to the ways of thought could penetrate the mysteries
of that recondite subject. Moreover, since there were no
periodicals and few books, why should people wish to read,
anyhow? Such questionings, first suggested — it must in all candor
be admitted — by some of the leaders of the Church itself, and
naturally taken up and urged by the majority of the Spanish
colonists, served greatly to cool the zeal of the Franciscan and
Dominican missionaries. From the beginning they generally
had not believed it worth while to teach girls, and in dealing
with the Indians had shown a marked preference for the sons
of the nobles. Such primitive institutions as they had built
up gradually disintegrated under these attacks. The missions
ceased to be centers of teaching, and gradually came to be
settlements of indolent monks. These lived off the labor of
the Indians in the fields which were an appurtenance to the
establishment, said masses, baptized babies, married the
young people, buried the dead, and otherwise went through
the routine of official duties, but almost completely aban
doned their teaching function. This process was hastened and
finally consummated when at length the administration of
these missions — most of which had now become an asset and
not a liability — passed by pontifical order from the monks to
the secular priests.
Of the idyllic character of many of these missions, and of
the unflagging zeal of not a few of the monks, there is ample
evidence. The boys of the community were gathered into
the schoolrooms and taught the rudiments of letters, along
18

with the "Christian doctrine," which always had the prime
emphasis. In the early mornings and late afternoons, before
or after their work in the fields, the men came to the patio, or
open court, of the school, and also received their instruction.
This was even more rudimentary. To the same open-air
school came the girls, who were not thought to require anything
more than teaching in religion, morals, and household arts.
In rare cases provision was made for boarding and lodging
students — boys, of course. Mostly, however, the schools held
only day sessions. As the Indians were accustomed to gather
in settlements about these mission stations, which always
occupied eligible and well-watered sites, there was usually no
lack of students for the monks who felt moved to teach. These
same Indians, under the supervision of the farmer-monks,
labored to construct churches, monasteries, granaries, store
houses and fort-like inclosures, and cultivated widely extended
glebes. The Indians were attached to their spiritual leaders
and teachers, and gave freely of their time and labor. Neither
parents nor pupils, however, could be impressed with the need
of systematic daily attendance, upon the schools. Such
regularity did not comport with Indian temperament or habits.
In Mexico City and other centers of population the educa
tional problem early became a pressing one. It was in such
centers that extremes of poverty and wealth tended to show
themselves. Even before the coming of the Spaniards Mexico
had its rabble. The utter demoralization of the social organism
which the Conquest induced greatly increased the number of
this proletariat. To it were added in a very few years the
greater part of the despised and abandoned offspring of the
Spanish soldier and the wretched Indian woman. Many
Spaniards even, caught in the meshes of native vice, and
especially beguiled by the native drinks, sank to the level of
this motley and hopeless throng. Within fifteen years after
the occupation of the Government by the Spaniards, the
condition and numbers of this lower class were such, upon the
inauguration of the vice-regal system, as to cause grave concern
to the first viceroy, and to the early bishops of the new diocese.
Their representations, and other reports of the situation of
the poor mestizos, resulted finally in the issue of a royal edict
19

in the year 1553 for the opening of an institution of learning
for the special benefit of the youths of this class. This was
the "college" of San Juan de Letran.* In it were taught
reading, writing, and Christian doctrine. It received a small
income from the royal treasury, and had a charter direct from
the Crown. One of the objects of this foundation, as stated
in its constitution, was that the young men educated there
might become teachers in other schools. It seems thus to
have been the forerunner of all normal schools in the New
World. In Tlaltelolco, a suburb of Mexico, the Franciscans
had already founded a school for Indian boys in 1536,
twelve years after the arrival of the first missionaries. The
course there was somewhat more extended than in most of
them, for to reading, writing, and Christian doctrine were
added grammar, Latin, rhetoric, philosophy, music, and
medicine. (Arithmetic is not mentioned by the authority
here consulted — Icazbalceta.) One singular outcome of this
short-lived educational enterprise was the fact that Indian
boys educated there came to be the teachers and spiritual
guides of Creoles and even of Spaniards. (In the social scale
of the time the order of precedence was Spaniard, creole,
Indian, mestizo.) In 1544, after twenty years of work by the
missionaries, Bishop Zumarraga, in seeking to secure the
translation into the language of the Indians of a certain book
of doctrine, gave as his reason that "there were so many of
them that could read." Considering that these early mis
sionaries had first to master the native language and then
reduce it to writing, it is no small tribute to their zeal and
ability that within the space of twenty years they had pro
duced among the Indians a generation of readers.
Among the ecclesiastics who came to Mexico during the
first century of Spanish rule were many university men. As
the wealth and social status of the colony advanced, these men
were the leaders in agitating for the establishment of an
institution of learning of high grade. The colonists them
selves — whose wealth had rapidly increased, and whose sons,
if they secured an education, had either to go to Spain, or send
there for private tutors — joined in the demand. In 1551, there-

*Cf. Alaman, Historia de Mexico, I, 18, note. — I. J. C.
20

fore, a royal cedula was issued ordering the foundation of a
"college of all sciences," and in 1553, two years later, the
University was formally inaugurated. This was, as will have
been noted, the year of the opening of the college of San Juan
de Letran. The Dominicans had been the leaders in urging
the establishment of the University, and its administration was
at the beginning entrusted to them. Meantime, a lay brother
of the Franciscans, Pedro de Gante, had built up a huge primary
school for poor boys alongside the monastery of his order in
Mexico City.* A convent school for girls grew up later as
the result, also, of his efforts to do something for the sisters
of his multitude of boys.
There were a good many other primary schools, all of the
same general type, which came into being alongside the various
monastic establishments of the different orders. The devotion
of wealthy Creoles and Spanish colonists often placed in the
hands of the orders valuable properties in real estate and
vested funds, and the groups of friars multiplied, both within
and without the centers of population. Teachers imported
from Spain and those who began to be trained in the native
institutions came in time to establish a goodly number of
private schools of various types. The Government, however,
did practically nothing. Even when it occasionally founded a
school it at once turned the administration of it over to the
monks; the natural result being that the institution soon
differed in no wise from the openly ecclesiastical type. The
pious sentiments expressed from time to time by the Spanish
Crown do not atone for the complete abandonment of all
responsibility for the education of the Mexican people. How
ever firmly the kings of Spain might have held the idea that all
education should be in the hands of the Church, there could
at least be no justification for withholding the financial assist
ance that might have made the Church efficient. That was
before the day of government lay schools, and the theory was
almost universally accepted that the training of the young
should be left wholly to ecclesiastics, in order to guarantee

*He was the pioneer of education in New Spain, if not in the whole New World. In 1522
he founded the first school in Texcoco, and afterwards that of San Francisco in Mexico City.
In Michoacan, just in the first decades of the Spanish Conquest, education was successfully
started by Bishop Vasco de Quiroga, the founder of the Colegio de San Nicolas. — E. A. C.
21

that it should be religious. How was it possible for the Govern
ment to escape the thought that the people of Mexico were
entitled to have some proportion of the enormous sums wrung
from them in taxation used in the training of their own sons
and daughters? This question still remains a mystery.
Later in the sixteenth century (1572) came the Jesuits to
Mexico. Throughout its history and in all the wide geo
graphic range of its activities this order has been identified
with the work of education. Its beginnings in Mexico were
humble, however, and the expressed intentions of the first
representatives were to devote themselves primarily to preach
ing. But they early secured a hold among the well-to-do of
the colonists, who began to urge them to assume responsibility
for the education of the sons of the colonists. In spite of this,
the first educational enterprise of the order in Mexico was for
the benefit of poor boys. This was the foundation of the college
of Santa Maria de Todos los Santos, in 1573, carrying an
endowment of ten free scholarships with board and lodging.
It was made possible by a donation offered by Dr. Francisco
Rodriguez Santos, who at first wished to enter this order and
donate to it all his property, but was persuaded by the father
superior, Pedro Sanchez, to found instead this college.*
The same Jesuit father superior, Pedro Sanchez, preached
a sermon in favor of the establishment of a theological seminary,
and so stirred the laymen who heard him that a group of them
formed a board and got together an endowment for such an
institution. Thus the Seminary of San Pedro y San Pablo was
founded, at the end of the same year, 1573. A little later the
Augustinians founded the College of San Pablo; and there began
to be no little competition in undertakings of this kind. Pro
vincial seminaries for the training of Indian youths to be
missionaries had already been established in different parts of
the country. One of these, after suffering numerous vicissi
tudes, still survives in the Colegio de San Nicolas, now a state
school, at Morelia, State of Michoacan, apparently the oldest

*It should be observed that the word "college" is used loosely here as the translation of
the corresponding Spanish term. This term does not describe such an institution as in
modern English is connoted by the word. In the period under review the institutions so
called were usually barely above the grade of primary schools, the best of them hardly
reaching that of the modern high school. — I. J. C.
22

school with a continuous history in Mexico, and one of the
oldest on the American continent. Its chief claim to fame,
outside this fact of its antiquity, is that it was the alma mater
of Father Hidalgo, the Liberator of Mexico. He was also for
a time rector of the institution.*

?For a brief summary of a few sporadic efforts to establish a school system in a Spanish
frontier villa or town, cf. article by I. J. Cox on "Educational Efforts in San Fernando de
Bexar," (now San Antonio, Texas), in Quarterly of the Texas Historical Association, July,
1902, VI, 27-63. As shown tliere (pp. 27-35) some Httle educational leaven was beginning to
work among the creole and mestizo classes during the last thirty years of Spanish rule. This
was, of course, pitifully weak and inconsequential, but its presence should at least be noted.
It is only fair to add that for a small element of the population, composed almost exclusively
of high-class Creoles, there were cultural advantages of no mean character at the close of the
vice-regal period. Public functions at the capital and in other important centers were marked
by contests in poetry and oratory. Some of the productions of these contests received recogni
tion in Europe. The Inquisition was active in suppressing what it regarded as objectionable
books, but the book-trade in certain publications was flourishing. In the last decade of the
eighteenth century a creditable edition of Livy was printed in Mexico City and sold by sub
scription, and there were other instances of classical authors finding a market in New Spain.
Large and well-selected private libraries were reported in the capital and elsewhere. Mexico
City boasted of an Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1803 dedicated an equestrian statue of Carlos
IV that still arouses artistic enthusiasm. At this same period there was considerable writing
of local history. After 1784 periodicals like the Gaceta de Mexico, the Diario de Mexico, and
the Diario de Vera Cruz began to publish general as well as governmental and commercial
news. In spite of rigorous censorship they exerted a beneficial effect on public opinion and
indicated an encouraging amount of general culture among the higher classes. Possibly this
manifestation was largely due to the enlightened policy of Carlos III and his subordinates, and
much of it disappeared during the succeeding political disturbances; but it must be confessed
that the cultural opportunities in Mexico City, on the eve of the struggle for independence,
compare favorably with those of any American city at the outbreak of the Revolution. —
I. J. C 23

Ill — PERIOD OF POLITICAL LIBERATION
Summary
The educational plans of colonial days were inadequate. Political
movements for freedom were belated in Latin America. The Napoleonic
intervention in Spain gave colonists their opportunity. The revolution
was a movement of the plebeian class. The first plan was to set up a
"Catholic monarchy" in Mexico, out of reach of Napoleon. Failing this,
change was made to republicanism, in emulation of the United States.
SUCH, in rough outline, were the educational provisions
with which Spain set out to do her duty by her namesake
in the New World. Our purpose does not demand that
we should trace through the three hundred years of the vice
regal period the vicissitudes of these educational institutions,
the shifting ideals which animated those in control of them,
and the varying fortunes of the whole cause of education, as
between Church and State, between Crown and colony,
hidalgo and creole. It will suffice to pass at once to a view of
Mexico as that country emerged from the somnolence of
colonial days into the stir and bustle of the century of independ
ence. Mexico attained her political freedom, along with most
other Spanish and Portuguese colonies, in the early years of
the nineteenth century. This general movement in Latin
America resulted from the gradual working of the republican
leaven, liberated into the world's thought by the successful
dash for independence of the English colonies in America and
later by the vast upheaval of the French Revolution. That
Latin America (as we have of late come to describe it) was thus
fifty years behind the British colonies is an index of the slower
rate at which public sentiment is formed and propagated
among those peoples than among such as possess a free press
and show a high percentage of literacy. The democratic and
leveling effects of the Protestant religion, as compared with the
emphasis on obedience and submission characteristic of Catholic
doctrine, should doubtless also be taken into account.
24

Something more, however, than the mere dissemination of
liberal sentiments and of a desire for national independence and
for self-government had to supervene in order that the Spanish-
American colonies might achieve their independence. They
had been drained of their resources to enrich the mother
country. Their peoples, instinctively loyal, had been long
trained to submission. The powerful sanctions of religion
were invoked to strengthen the hold of civil authority. And
Spain was, and had long been, a proud and efficient military
power. It was only, therefore, when the nightmare of the
Napoleonic cataclysm was upon Europe, and when the Spanish
Government, along with many others, had fallen into the
hands of the Corsican, that the clock of destiny struck for
Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and the rest. They did not
break the shackles that held them to the Old World; the
shackles fell away.
In Mexico the culmination came by the working of a queer
contradiction, thoroughly characteristic of that anomalous
land. For years there had been restlessness on the part of the
indigenous peoples. They did not quite know what independ
encia meant, but they were sure that their condition ought to
be improved — that, indeed, it could not be worse. So, at last,
while the Corsican dominated the mother country, they rose
up in a great wave of protest, and under the priest Hidalgo,
sweeping all before them, came to the very gates of Mexico
City. They could doubtless have taken it by mere weight of
numbers, had they gone on. But the heart of the priest-
general failed him. He hesitated, then retired. Once the
retreat had begun, the vast throng of unarmed, ill-provisioned
peasants disintegrated under the blows of a small group of
soldiers; and in a few months Hidalgo's head was upon a stake.
This was in 1810-11. Guerrilla bands kept the war going.
The government policing was inefficient at best. Spain needed
all her soldiers and all her attention for affairs at home. Be
tween republicans in his own domain and Napoleonism outside,
the lot of the Spanish monarch was just then far from happy.
Even after the allies disposed of Napoleon and were settling
the affairs of Europe, they could not save Ferdinand VII of
Spain from domestic troubles. The Juntas and the Cortes
25

were demanding a liberal constitution, freedom of the Govern
ment from ecclesiastical control, and reforms of all kinds.
In Mexico, the ragged patriots who had been for ten years
warring for independence were opposed by a Government and
an Army which represented loyalty to the old order — the
Crown and the Church, the Catholic Monarchy of Spain. So
when Spain itself appeared about to divest itself of the Catholic
king, the happy thought occurred to the loyal leaders overseas
to invite him to Mexico to set up a monarchy which should
thenceforth be independent of Spain. By this step the demand
for independence could be reconciled with loyalty to the Church.
The compromise was proposed to the rebels, who, as good
Catholics, but desirous of national independence, saw nothing
objectionable in it. Thus the two sides came together under
the "Plan of Iguala," and the tri-color flag of independent
Mexico was adopted, the red, white, and green signifying the
three guarantees of independence, religion, and union. Despite
his troubles with the liberals in Spain, however, Ferdinand did
not emigrate to Mexico; and though the plan which had been
adopted provided for another succession in that event, the
ambition of Iturbide, the loyalist leader, led him to assume the
position of Emperor of Mexico, and to attempt to set up there
an independent kingdom. Republican sentiment was very
strong among the Mexicans, however, and Iturbide's kingdom
was of short life. Following it came the adoption of the first
republican constitution, that of 1824, which was the beginning
of the effort, that still continues in that unhappy land, to
establish on the basis of the independence so strangely achieved
the rule of the people by the people.

2G

IV
CONDITIONS AT BEGINNING OF INDEPENDENCE
Summary
The prolonged failure of popular government in Mexico was due to the
failure of the Colonial system of education. The real people had not been
educated. On the contrary, numerous factors had been at work to degrade
them. They were the victims of all kinds of tyrannies. Wealth came at
last to be the social criterion. By its possession or its lack, the people
were grouped into higher and lower classes. The matter of blood and race
gradually ceased to be of importance.
AFTER a hundred years, self-government is yet without
assured success in Mexico. It is not too much to say
that the principal reason for this is to be found in the
failure of early plans for the education of the people. For
those devices, undertaken as has been already described, three
centuries before, had failed. The priests, the lawyers, the
doctors, the sons of wealthy families, had received training,
but the people — the Creoles, the mestizos, the Indians, the
masses, or, speaking more exactly, the mass, of the Mexican
people — were left in ignorance. The welter of social, political,
industrial, and other influences had, indeed, wrought its effects
on the common people. Their condition at the beginning of
the period of independence was a composite result of these
long-exerted forces. But that phase of it which is most out
standing, and which lay most obviously and stubbornly in
the road of future political success under republican forms, was
their ignorance. Careful estimates indicate that of a popula
tion of perhaps 6,000,000, only 30,000 could read and write.
This, as will be seen, is exactly one-half of one per cent.
The truth is that there had never been any sentiment in
favor of the education of the Indians aside from that exhibited
by the very early missionaries. The mestizos were almost
equally unfortunate. And since even the monks had a most
limited conception of what education the Indians required,
and since their successors, the secular curates, did not even carry
27

forward the rudimentary instructions that had at first been
undertaken, the outcome of it all was that the bulk of the
Mexican population was little better off in the matter of letters
at the end of the Spanish dominion than at the beginning.
Meantime, numerous influences had tended to degrade the
Mexicans of the lower classes. The very insistence on class
distinction had been little short of a calamity. The caciques
held their subjects in low esteem, as belonging to an inferior
order. This discrimination — for which there seems to have
been no sort of justification in fact — was accepted by the
Spaniards. It was even enforced by them, which was far more
serious. They saw no reason why the chiefs should not hold
their subjects as slaves, as they had formerly done, though
the Spanish Government, through its Council for the Indies,
and through the influence of the Church, contended earnestly
against anything like enslavement of the Indians. The
decrees and dispositions relative to this and similar abuses,
still of record in the archives of the Spanish Crown, are greatly
to the credit of the Christian monarchs of those days, and to
that of the ecclesiastical leaders who were their principal
advisers. But it seemed impossible to devise regulations which the
avarice and the arrogance of the colonists could not set aside.
The very means of which the Crown availed itself for the
Christianizing and protection of the Indians were constantly
taken advantage of by the colonial overlords to oppress and
enslave them. The caciques led the way in domineering
cruelty and industrial exploitation, and the Spanish colonists
and Creoles were apt and willing learners. Were lands distrib
uted to Spanish soldiers and settlers, they seized the people
along with them. Indeed, repartimientos soon came to be
calculated in heads of people, instead of hectareas of land.
Were the Indians commended to Christian settlers, to be
taught and Christianized, the settlers made them work on
farms and in mines; and while pocketing the resulting riches,
justified themselves by pretending that the Indians were
benefited by the discipline. Even the teachers made the
natural sloth and backwardness of their Indian pupils a pretext
for inhuman floggings, and adopted as one of their chief
28

principles the common pedagogical saying, La letra con sangre
entra — Learning enters through blood-letting.
In many sections the sternest kind of measures were taken
to force the Indians, habituated to solitude and privacy, to
live in villages. The extent to which such a regulation would
lend itself to abuse never seems to have dawned on the author
ities in Spain. They were interested in facilitating the work
of evangelization, and, incidentally, the census, for purposes
of taxation. Another injustice, which all the humaneness and
even tenderness of the regulations concerning the poor natives
of the New World failed to atone for, was the odious head tax
of one dollar a year, exacted of all Indians from the very
beginning. This tax was divided into various funds, only a
part of it going directly to the Crown. But the collection of
it subjected the Indians to incalculable abuses, and resulted,
also, in systematic and lucrative fraud upon the part of the
collectors. They falsified the census returns, for example,
reporting far fewer Indians than they really had collected from;
also, they often managed, by the connivance of the local
authorities and otherwise, to increase the amount of the tax
itself, to the tribulation of the poor Indians.
These came in time to view with suspicion and uneasiness
every measure enforced among them. The King of Spain
might mean to be kind, but his laws always worked sorrow for
them. There were, as times passed, violent native uprisings
in several sections of the country, and more than one prolonged
and bloody Indian war. Yet for the most part the natives in
the territory of what is now Mexico, were, like their descendants
today, uniformly docile and pacific.
As was inevitable from the beginning, the social distinc
tion between classes settled down finally upon the criterion of
wealth. The caciques came to a more or less ridiculous end.
As time went on, every Indian who chanced to be elected
alcalde, or who received a government appointment of any
kind, considered that he was thereby elevated to the class of
cacique. The hereditary glamour which had continued to
cling about certain families came thus gradually to fade.
There were caciques on every hand, kings of shreds and patches;
many of them trying to preserve ancestral dignity, though
29

living in clay huts, and digging to earn a scanty fare of corn
and beans. *
Many of the descendants of the conquistadores were equally
unimpressive. Not having taken pains to acquire, or having
failed to hold, productive lands or mines that might have given
them the enduring power of gold, as against the brief glory of
being victors and officers of the Crown, they slid down, along
with their mestizo descendants, into the great conglomerate
mass. The various ingredients making up that mass became
year by year more and more indistinguishable. They were
fused together in the fire of poverty, they were welded into one
under the hammer of persecution. By the time of national
emancipation there had thus come into being the vast and
fairly homogeneous mass of the Mexican people — five millions
of them, more or less. Of these at least nine-tenths belonged to
the "lower class." Aside from a few crude and isolated Indian
tribes, left undigested in remote mountainous sections, and the
exceptionally depraved substratum in the larger cities, there
was no warrant for distinguishing these nine-tenths of the
Mexicans from the other tenth as "lower." The distinction
was alike invidious and gratuitous, f Cacique was no longer
distinguishable from macehual; hidalgo and criollo were jumbled
together inseparably; even the despised mestizo, now multiplied
until he formed half or more of the total population, could no
longer be looked down upon. All these elements were present
in the "upper class," as well as in the mass. The Mexican
people in blood, at least, was at last one. Its classes differed
only in the matter of opportunity, and in those traits resulting
from opportunity, or the want of it. This was the situation
which the men faced who undertook, a hundred years ago, to
follow the lead of their neighbors just to the north in establish
ing a popular government. Those men, during the stress of a
ten years' war, had been themselves drawn from all the different

*The real caciques have not wholly disappeared from the Republic, but within the last twenty
or thirty years have changed their characteristics. Don Juan Alvarez, a cacique of the State
of Guerrero, in the middle of the last century, was a zealous patriot, who later became president
of the Republic. Today there are remnants of the cacique system in such states as Oaxaca
and Chiapas. — E. A. C.
fThe existence of an immense mass of poor people and of a few rich families was not a new
situation for Mexico. The lack of unity in each class, emphasized by differences in educa
tion, was the essential fact. — E. A. C. 30

groups composing the population. Some were of pure Spanish
blood, some were Indians, some mestizos. They all agreed,
in so far as they faced at all the problems involved in their
undertaking, that one of the primary steps required would be
the education of the people. Ignorance was general and
appalling; and citizens of sovereign republics must not be
ignorant.

31

V — EDUCATION UNDER THE REPUBLIC
Summary
The study of education prior to the founding of the Republic is only a
preliminary process. Our chief interest is in what has been done since.
Leaders in the movement for independence were, also, partisans of popular
education. The constitution of 1824 was not exactly adapted to Mexican
conditions. At the very beginning there arose the tense political con
troversy between Centralists and Federalists. The liberation from Spanish
political control was not the final consummation of Mexico's liberty.
Spiritual, intellectual, and industrial liberty had yet to be achieved. The
Centralists and clericals did not encourage popular education. Their
oppressions tended to arouse the people. The liberal party favored educa
tion, but was never long in power. The country became greatly im
poverished by continuous fighting. This also hindered the development
of public education. The burden was upon the States. They shifted it
to the municipios. For lack of funds, of teachers, inspection, etc., progress
was slow. Upon the adoption of the Constitution of 1824, and the state
constitutions, there followed much scholastic legislation. It was made
sterile by repeated revolutions.
FOR our present purpose the preceding exposition of
educational and social conditions during and at the
close of Mexico's colonial days is merely preliminary.
The Mexican people are still engaged, as they have been with
deadly earnestness for a century, in the attempt to maintain
popular government. It is the educational history which has
accompanied this endeavor, not that which preceded it, which
will throw most light on conditions now obtaining, and those
to be faced in the immediate future. That history, however,
more especially during the early decades of the nation's inde
pendent life, has been largely typified by the ethnic, social,
industrial, and political conditions remaining over as an
inheritance from vice-regal days. It has seemed worth while,
therefore, to set forth those conditions in this somewhat
extended review. Perhaps it is not amiss, also, to draw
attention once more to the fact that racial influences had, and
still have, much to do with any matter affecting the life of the
Mexican people. We, as citizens of the United States, are
32

without a parallel in experience for the racial history and
situation offered by Mexico. In this part of America the
nomadic and scattering aborigines gave way so swiftly and so
completely before the invasion of their country by European
settlers, that they exerted no appreciable effect as an amalgam
in the subsequent population. They were not attached to the
soil, nor had they developed social, political, or industrial
efficiency to a point that would make it possible for them
to mingle with and compete with the immigrants. In Mexico
all was different. No greater mistake could be made than to
judge the "Indians" of that country by the "Indians" who
inhabited this.
While it is true, as was pointed out above, that the leaders
in those movements which consolidated the political inde
pendence of Mexico accepted the principle that the people
should be educated, it can not be said that they concerned
themselves immediately and actively with this undertaking.
Their first problem was the political one. That was both
intense and urgent. They were unconscious themselves of
how contradictory were their theories, and the facts with
which they had to deal. Led by a natural and innocent
enthusiasm, they were bent upon following the successful
example of the United States, and establishing a universal
democracy. They even went so far as to model their con
stitution by ours, providing for a federation of sovereign
states. The American Constitution grew out of the voluntary
association of such states, political entities that had had a
previous separate existence. The Mexican states, as framed
under the new constitution, had had no such history. In a
general and loose way as provinces of the larger colony of New
Spain, or as dioceses in Church government, they had ex
perienced a quasi-separation from each other. As a matter of
fact, the vice-regal government had always been strongly,
even autocratically, centralized. For such a situation the
American Constitution, a compromise document, qualified by
the mutual jealousies of all the component English colonies,
and with difficulty agreed to even then, was a manifest misfit.
Equally obvious was the gap between purpose and realiza
tion when sovereign citizenship and the responsibility for self-
33

government were in theory conferred upon an illiterate and
untrained mass of five millions of people. A very large propor
tion of them were serfs. Though freed from the authority of
the Spanish Crown, they were still under the heel of land
owners and mine bosses. Three hundred years of virtual
slavery had induced in them the servile type of mind. They
were contentedly ignorant. They were instinctively submis
sive. Their religion was a crass superstition. They had no
intellectual life, no mental stimulus, no aspirations. If this
had been true merely of a small proportion of the total popula
tion, it might not have been held serious. But the proportion
was large, not small; it was preponderant; it was well nigh
the whole.
Almost instantly, moreover, the matter of the enlighten
ment and training of this ill-prepared citizenship was forced
into the background by acute friction among the leaders over
politics. The country had been trained for centuries to
centralized government, usually an autocratic one. The
idealists had wished to get away from the evils of this system,
and so the new constitution called for a federation. It was
adopted — the first one, of 1824 — as a rebound from the auto
cratic monarchy which Iturbide had attempted to set up.
From that day to this, from the close of the first constitutional
president's term in 1828 to the revolution of 1913, the struggle
between Centralists and Federalists has contributed its full
share to the political problems of Mexico. The two parties
have at times taken other names, and have had, both of them,
many affiliations and associates, but they remain substantially
the same. There was much of right and of reason on both
sides. One may well regret that the early governmental
schedules did not make provision for some recognition of such
political training as the Mexican people had hitherto received,
instead of following too closely standards set up elsewhere
under wholly different conditions. Yet it must be admitted,
after all, that the difficulties with which the Mexicans had to
contend were inherent. It was impossible that out of elements
there existing a free people should be brought into being
without travail. 34

Mexico's troubles did not cease with independence. Her
people had to be freed from other restraints besides the polit
ical power of Spain. The dominion of ignorance and super
stition had to be broken, and the thralldom of an intolerable
industrial system annihilated. The Church and the Army
from the first instinctively allied themselves with the centraliz
ing tendencies. In this they were backed by the wealthy and
aristocratic elements in the population. Against this puissant
combination of spiritual, military, and financial powers, the
people, like a blind and helpless, but tremendously vital giant,
have struggled for a hundred years. It is human nature to
cling to one's possessions, and Church and Army and land
holders alike held on tenaciously to the special privileges that
had come to them in the days of royalty and favoritism. It
was forty years after independence came, for example, before
the attempt to have a State Church, intolerant of all others,
was abandoned. For nearly the same length of time the
clergy and the military had special courts of their own (fueros),
and were not amenable to the ordinary courts of the land.
For the perpetuation of these privileges they fought bitterly.
Yet all the time the patriots were struggling to inaugurate
equality before the law.*
This effort to have a State Church in a free republic serves
well as an illustration of how slowly the Mexicans themselves
came to understand the inherent contradictions between their
program and their situation. Other examples are not wanting.
And meantime the evils of that situation were at work. No
group, for example, would openly oppose the education of the
people. Yet it could not have been concealed from the party
of privilege that once the common people were led out of this
stupor of helpless ignorance, they would also be clothed with
power to achieve their ideals. Hence, as may easily be inferred,
when the Centralists were in power, not much progress was
made in developing popular education. And since that party

?Indeed, in a real sense this has not been a popular contest. "The people" as a social entity,
with a social conscience, does not exist in Mexico. Such measure of liberty and equality as has
come to its inhabitants is the result of a long and weary struggle among strong, audacious
leaders, few in number, frequently misinformed, and seldom displaying any unity of purpose
among themselves. Yet, up to 1910, they had achieved considerable progress in organizing
a certain type of government, roughly adapted to the genius of the people, and in developing
the material resources of the country. — E. A. C.
35

naturally gathered unto itself the enlightened elements of the
population, the men who had had experience in holding office
and who had studied the science of government, while
their opponents were for the most part crudely trained, drawn
from the mass of Indians and mestizos, men who had forged
their way upward from the lower stratum of society, nothing
was more natural than that for a good many years the Centralists
should be in power most of the time. They held the upper
hand till there was time for the training of a generation in the
hard school of experience. A thoughtful Mexican historian
explains the fact that the liberals were so long in the minority
by the skill with which their opponents made every issue a
religious question. The people, devoted as they were to the
Church, were most reluctant to take sides against the Church
leaders, or to help a party which, as those leaders assured them,
was bent upon the destruction of religion itself.
During those decades, instead of adjusting themselves to
the situation, and incorporating into their program enough of
popular measures to hold the good will of the masses, and to
deprive their opponents of weapons with which to fight them,
the Centralists — with the usual fatuousness of people of that
type — went quite to the contrary extreme. The absurd
constitution of 1836, the repeated dictatorships of Santa Anna,
the arrogance of the army, the loss of Texas and the fiasco of
the American war, together with gross financial wastefulness,
the neglect of public works, and the impoverishment of an
already exhausted country, culminating at last in the crowning
treason of bringing in a foreign potentate — all this laid up for
them a heavy score to be paid off when the day of reckoning
came. That day moved inevitably onward, a veritable dies
irae. Juarez, the little Indian, personification of native Mexico,
with his little cabinet of the inmaculados (stainless), and his
ragged regiments of volunteers, was the instrument in the hands
of long-delayed but inevitable Justice.
While the long struggle was under way, the popular party
saw as clearly as did their opponents, that the education of the
people was the one step which would guarantee the triumph of
genuine democracy. Their leaders are on record again and
again as laying down this principle; and in the brief intervals
36

when they had control, measures were repeatedly taken in
the interest of education. But those intervals of power were
infrequent and brief. In two outline histories of education
during the nineteenth century, one covering the State of
Jalisco and the other that of Nuevo Leon, time and again the
authors, after detailing plans that had been laid out, laws that
had been passed, the personnel even of the teaching force that
had been nominated, mournfully remark that all these provi
sions became ineffective at a certain date because of changes in
the political situation. The hardships endured by many men,
in all sections of the Republic, who felt themselves called
to this work of educating the people, and who persisted in their
attempt to be obedient to this high calling, no matter what
happened in politics and public affairs, make a chapter of
heroism that the future historian of Mexico will dwell upon
with just pride.
Another factor, in addition to the perennial political dis
turbances, affected profoundly the development of public
education. This was the poverty of the public treasury.
The constant shifting of the political center of gravity caused
frequent armed conflicts. These brought their inevitable
accompaniments of ineffective policing, of neglected agri
culture and diminished commerce, and of the absorption of
all available men into the armies, and of all available funds into
the war treasury. "Military necessity" was often a pretext
for robbery, and first one party and then the other harried the
country, carrying off grain and livestock, robbing convoys of
bullion, frightening capital into hiding, and in numerous other
ways reducing a country naturally rich in resources to a state
of abject penury. This condition was the rule rather than the
exception during the entire sixty years from 1820 to 1880.
The shifts to which the military and political leaders were
driven to finance their movements, especially those of the
popular or liberal party, who, to begin with, represented the
side of poverty as against wealth, are only equalled by the
misery in which these continuous revolutions left the people
at large. Cities, haciendas, and churches, were stripped of
every form of visible wealth. Silver ornaments were melted
down and coined into money, jewelry and precious stones
37

were sold, lead was molded into bullets, steel was beaten into
weapons, bells became cannon, grain was commandeered for
the commissary. The whole land was peeled again and again.
Naturally, when the national treasury itself was empty the
separate states were still worse off. The state organizations
were the plaything of national politics. The Federalists set
them up in due form and order; the Centralists in their turn
upset and even abolished them, or, at least, subordinated them
completely to the central Government. Since, following still
the example of the United States, the matter of education had
been left wholly to the initiative of the several states, this
uncertainty, this precariousness of tenure, on the part of the
state governments, affected most disastrously the interests of
education. One might expect, however, that during the long
permanence in power of the Centralist party, some measures,
by way of pretext, at least, for the education of the people
would have been devised by the general Government. The
only instance would seem to be the law of 1842, referred to
below. For the leaders of the Centralist party had been
trained in the school of Spanish politics. They apparently were
not sure that the common people needed education. Subcon
sciously they felt also no doubt, as already suggested, that the
education of the masses would be disastrous to their favorite
policies and would jeopardize their tenure of power.
As for the states, another element of uncertainty was
introduced into educational endeavor, during the intervals
when the states were permitted to exercise a reasonable measure
of autonomy, and that was the division of responsibility for
the schools between the state governments and the munici
palities. Partly to follow still the theory of local self-govern
ment, but even more because the poverty of their treasuries
made them helpless, the state authorities from time to time
tried the experiment of leaving education wholly to the munici
pal governments. These municipios are in conception some
what like the early New England "towns." They comprise
rural districts along with the central settlement. Naturally,
nothing was gained by this device. If the state was poor,
the municipalities were poorer. They had only the scantiest
funds for an undertaking that seemed to them colossal. More-
38

over, the schools thus handled were without the supervision
of experts from the central office of the state, and only in the
capitals and other larger cities were men to be found capable
of taking the management of such work. In spite of excellent
theories, therefore, and in the face of a constantly growing and
urgent popular demand— and this was something really new,
a by-product of the long-drawn struggle for freedom — educa
tion languished.*

*A definite instance of this sort occurred in Coahuila and Texas when, in 1833, the legislative
body of that dual state provided that the various municipalities were to sell the pubhc property
within their limits and use the funds for the establishment of primary schools. Moreover,
all vacant property was to revert to the state and be used for a similar purpose. Yet no
substantial improvement followed this legislation. Cf. Cox, op. cit. 39, 40.
Senor Chavez reports that under the Diaz government the Secretaria de Instruceion Piiblica
y Bellas Artes often received requests for aid from "scantily-settled communities where the
scholastic population was so sparse as to make the maintenance of a school most difficult.'*
These requests for the foundation of schools by the general Government sometimes came from
communities outside the federal district and were accompanied by offers of small buildings
and other properties for school purposes. This desire to co-operate, so far as its scanty resources
permitted, was also manifested by the Mexican authorities of San Antonio in the period men
tioned above. — I. J. C. 39

VI — DEVELOPMENTS, 1821-1867
Summary
The first of these dates, 1821, marks the achievement of independence,
the second the triumph of republicanism. Since the second, 1867, education
in Mexico has assumed its modern form, as obligatoria, gratuita, y laica —
compulsory, free, and secular.
A long series of revolutions began in 1829. Early legislation was
obliterated by them. Use has been made of a history of education in Jalisco,
and of a similar history for Nuevo Leon. One development of the early
movements was a reawakening on the part of Church leaders. Education
was still in their hands during the early decades. Nuevo Leon issued its
constitution in 1825, providing for public education as a duty of the state.
The legislature formulated a law which was passed February, 1826. This
seems to have been one of the first instances of providing for compulsory
education. Insufficient fiscal provisions marked the laws of the first
decade. Jalisco, also, passed good laws. About this time the Lancasterian
system was introduced. It suited a situation where funds and teachers
were scarce. The system was adopted by the Federal Government, and
gradually spread through all the states. In those same years came the
development of the Institutos. These were remnants usually of the faculties
of letters and philosophy of the old church universities. Now they became
state schools. They were liberal and furnished centers for men of liberal
ideas and propensities. French thought had begun to affect the life of
Mexico. Through its acceptance in the institutos it reached directly the
educated men, and through them the educational system. Controversies
with Rome over patronage started a movement for separation between
Church and State. Radical proposals were made as early as 1833. The
Church resisted, and called in the army. Fueros were attacked. The
next twenty years (1833-1853) the Government was most of the time Cen
tralist. Only one educational move was made at headquarters, and this,
an executive order of Santa Anna in 1842, proved abortive. Lopez Cotilla
was an apostle of education in Jalisco. Santa Anna's dictatorship in
'53-54 brought on revolution. The Republicans undertook radical reforms
and adopted the constitution of 1857. Resistance by the clericals brought
on the Three Years' War and the Leyes de Reforma. The final breach
between the Church party and the people came when the clericals supported
the French Intervention. The reform laws had a wide-reaching effect.
The confiscation of Church property was justified by those responsible,
because of the interference of the clericals, and by reason of the needs of
the liberal government. All this resulted in a radical change of educational
standards. The Church was no longer looked to for public education.
The State accepted this task as a duty and a responsibility.
40

THE above dates are chosen because the first marks the
achievement of political freedom from Spain, and the
second the final vindication of the Republic, upon the
elimination of Maximilian and the French troops. The epoch
is a well-marked period. During those four and a half decades
the republican ideal gradually unfolded itself. The educational
standard was evolved along with the rest. By the time Juarez
was at last firmly seated as constitutional President (1868), he
and his associates had begun to see clearly — what had hitherto
appeared to them but fitfully and dimly— that, as it came to be
expressed, education was the duty of the state (including the
municipality) and should be ohligatoria, gratuita, y laica—
compulsory, free, and secular. In other words, it was recog
nized that the community was under obligation to supply tax-
supported schools, and the parents under obligation to send
their children to them; and that the theory long accepted that
the Church could be depended on to supply public education,
or, failing to do so, that the instruction given by the state
could and should be distinctively religious, was untenable.
Since we, at the very beginning of our national life, grappled
with the problem of separating Church and State, confusion
over the matter of religion in the public schools has in our
country been a secondary matter. But in Mexico, the Church
had had for hundreds of years entire control of education, even
of that supported by taxation (which was not a great matter,
to be sure). It was most natural, therefore, that it should take
time for the people to come to see clearly the distinction between
a church school and a public school. As a matter of fact,
during those earlier years of the Republic, when the con
servative and centralist influences were most of the time in
control of the Government, clerics continued to be the leaders
in educational work. The little that was done in the direction
of building up a public school system followed the time-honored
custom of identifying the schools with the monasteries and
convents, and relying almost wholly on the religious orders
and secular clergy for teachers.
The fleeting "empire" of Iturbide produced, so far as the
writer has been able to ascertain, no educational movement.
But when following it the republicans had their turn, they
41

embodied their noble and progressive aspirations in the Federal
Constitution of 1824, in the rapidly succeeding state constitu
tions which were based upon it, and in the statutes and execu
tive orders which everywhere came in a shower to complete
and make effective this organic legislation. Education was
given the place of honor. Some state constitutions even went
into particulars as to both principles and plans. Most of
them, however, stopped with laying down principles, leaving
details to be worked out in legislative statutes.
The state congresses and executives did not delay to comply
with this obligation. Everywhere educational programs were
framed, systems of schools were laid out, courses of study were
formulated. One reads today this elaborate legislation of
nearly a hundred years ago with mingled feelings. It is
admirable. It is surprising. There were educational seers in
those days, men of prophetic vision. They had gathered
suggestions and inspiration from all quarters. They were
absolutely open-minded. Their limitations were entirely those
of their time and conditions. In the law promulgated by the
State of Nuevo Leon, for example, the principle of compulsory
attendance at school is distinctly laid down; and 1826 is a very
early date in the history of this phase of public education.
But for all that, the legislation did not "march." In 1829
began the long series of revolutions. The progressive and
patriotic party was forced to yield control of the central govern
ment, and the conservatives, once in power, lost no time in
bringing also the several states into alignment. All these
elaborate and promising provisions for the education of the
people went then to the scrap-pile, along with most other
elements of the liberal program. Those early educational laws
have now about them an atmosphere of pathos. It seems too
bad that what promised so well should have come to naught.
Reference has been made to the legislation in the State of
Nuevo Leon. I have had, also, before me a history of primary
education in Jalisco. The story there is almost identical. No
doubt, the archives of many other states, if searched, would
disclose substantially the same history. Zacatecas, for example,
42

has long been known as a leader in educational matters, as
have been, also, Veracruz, Coahuila, and others. *
Following the effervescence of laws, projects (proyectos),
and programs during the quadrennium 1824-28, came a period
of quiescence. There were many resolute spirits, however,
who had consecrated themselves to the work of teaching, and
who were not greatly concerned with politics. These kept on
with their propaganda, and the subject was not allowed to
lapse. Some of the Church leaders, also, unwilling to forego
the long ascendancy which they had enjoyed in teaching,
bestirred themselves anew. For several years all legislation
or official action of any kind that was taken with reference to
education reverted to the colonial type in placing the work of
teaching in their hands. One interesting and unique incident
was a provision in some of the states for Sunday schools.
These schools, to be held on Sundays and other feast days,
were for the training of adults, as well as children, but were
limited specifically to the teaching of reading and writing.
Prizes were offered to the teachers who could show a certain
number of "graduates" in these branches. This was one
effort to make up for the neglect of educational affairs shown
by the Church leaders during the Spanish regime. So rare
was the ability to read and write at the time of the revolution
that when the government of Iturbide sought men for appoint
ment as the chief officers of municipalities, it is related on good
authority that there were towns of ten and twelve thousand
inhabitants without a single man able to write.
Before dismissing from our consideration the educational
ideals with which the Mexican Republic began its history—

*The decree of the constitutional congress of the state of Coahuila and Texas, May 13, 1829,
provided for the establishment of schools on the Lancasterian plan, in the capital of each of
the three departments into which the state was divided. These schools, restricted to 160
pupils each, were not free to all, but the separate municipal councils could maintain a limited
number of pupils in each school at public expense, and loan money to the general school fund,
in special emergencies. A comprehensive plan to raise money for the school fund was adopted
and measures taken to provide adequate salaries for the teachers. Instruction was to be
given in reading, writing, arithmetic, the dogma of the Catholic religion, and all of Ackerman's
"Catechisms of Arts and Sciences." In the following year the plan was modified so as to
provide for primary schools, the stipendium for teachers was considerably reduced, and a system
of "rewards of virtue and application" introduced. Despite the good intentions back of these
decrees, the absolute lack of funds prevented their realization. Cf. Cox, op. cit. 36-39. —
I. J. C. 43

those plans which for so long went without realization — in
order that we may take up the further course of the history of
education there, it will be worth while, perhaps, to review
briefly the specific provisions then made. They have been
indicated hitherto in only a desultory way. Details are given
of the legislative provisions and executive orders in Nuevo Leon
and Jalisco only. Their similarity will at once be noted, and
it may be inferred that they constitute a fair type of what took
place generally throughout the Republic.
From the concise and admirable Historical Review of Public
Education in Nuevo Leon (Resena Historica de la Instruceion
Publica en Nuevo Leon), written twenty years ago by an able
and honored representative of the teaching profession (pro-
fesorado) of Mexico, Professor Miguel F. Martinez, are taken
the following particulars. The Federal Constitution having
been proclaimed October 4, 1824, the people of Nuevo Leon
made haste to issue their state constitution, which was adopted
March 5, 1825. Article 230, section 10, of this instrument
declared that it was obligatory upon city governments to
"promote the proper education of the young, to establish
endowed schools of primary grade, to see to the due conserva
tion and right government of those already in existence,
respecting always the rights of individuals or corporations."
(Endowment here could scarcely have meant invested funds.)
Section 12, of the same Article, laid upon the members of these
same municipal governing bodies the duty of "visiting the
schools weekly, in order to inform themselves of their condition
and progress, such special attention being warranted by their
importance." In Article 257 the same constitution even went into details
as to the course of study for primary schools. It ordered that
in all villages of the state primary schools should be established
in which should "be taught reading, writing, the principles of
numbers, the catechism of Christian doctrine, and a summary
explanation of the duties of citizenship."
Still another Article, 259, ordered the state legislature to
formulate "a general governing plan for public instruction" to
obtain throughout the state, based upon "a simple and practi
cable method, properly adjusted to existing conditions."
44

One year after the adoption of the Constitution, February,
1826, the legislature issued as Provisional Act No. 73 the plan
provided for. It is divided into three parts: 1. General Pro
visions; 2. Primary Instruction; 3. Secondary Instruction.
Among the General Regulations is found one already referred
to, which affirms (Art. 4) : "Parents who through poverty can
not teach or have taught their children and servants at home
their Christian and civic duties, and to read and to write, shall
be required to send them to the public schools, such exemption
being made as the proper authority may permit in case they are
needed on farm or ranch or other productive work." Mr.
Martinez is disposed to claim on this basis, and with apparent
justice, that compulsory education in Nuevo Leon dates from
the year 1826. He admits that the law failed to provide for
the enforcement of this obligation, and that the law itself was
in force as such but a few years.* It stands still, however, as
a tribute to the ideals of the men of that early day.
Our author gives at some length the provisions for primary
schools. The course of studies was so elaborate and so modern,
that compared with that agreed upon at the First National
Congress on Education held in 1889, a curriculum that was
practically universal in the Republic at the time Mr. Martinez
wrote (1894), only five items were lacking, viz.: "lessons of
things, metric system, bookkeeping, political economy, and
choral singing." But there were three of genuine value in the
early course that were wanting in that of 1889, namely, horti
culture, agriculture, and rifle-firing. Special emphasis was
given to manual training and domestic arts, especially in the
course for girls. In 1829 this Provisional Statute No. 73 was
given the full force of law. Special provisions applying to
the districts of the state had already been passed, requiring the
municipalities to see that schools were provided even in the
smallest settlements (rancherias) — Mexico has no strictly rural
population — and demanding again that the municipal author
ities see to it that parents whose children roamed the streets
?For a similar condition in the neighboring state of Coahuila and Texas, cf. Cox, op. cit.
36-40. In this state the authorities continued to express their sentiments on the subject of
education as late as 1834. In his message of that year the governor wished to arouse the
parents of the state to the necessity of educating their children, "in order to banish the chaos
of ignorance in which the greater part of the communities lie." Coahuila and Texas resisted
the centralizing policy of Santa Anna long after other regions had submitted. — I. J. C.
45

should be compelled to send them to school or to put them to
work. Unfortunately the force of the legislation spent itself in
theoretical plans. No definite provision was made for financing
the system. It seems all the way to have been expected that
the municipal governments would assume the financial burden.
But they were poor, and their taxing authority limited. In
the absence of specific orders the thing went by default. It
was this failure more than anything else which made the
disappearance of the whole enterprise follow so easily upon a
shift in the political situation. Had fiscal provisions been
made, and a definite body and continuity been thus com
municated to the educational movement, its momentum would
have carried it forward, and the men who succeeded to power
would have thought twice before laying violent hands upon it.
Left unsupported, it fell by its own weight, or speaking more
exactly, it never had any but a theoretical and paper existence.
Sixteen years after the issue of the Review prepared by
Professor Martinez came the centenary of national independ
ence, celebrated in 1910. In commemoration of the event,
Professor Manuel R. Alatorre, at the time School Inspector for
the State, prepared that year a history of primary education
in Jalisco, from 1810 to 1910. This excellent monograph
compared with that of Mr. Martinez exhibits strikingly the
similarity of conditions throughout the Republic. As in
Nuevo Leon, there was in Jalisco the beginning out of nothing
under the liberal regime 1824-28, followed by the same sudden
lapse at the end of that period, due to political changes and
inadequate financing, the same indomitable persistence by
devoted teachers, the same semi-revival through a renewed
coalition with the Church leaders, the same final eclipse of the
liberal educational plans under the selfish and illiberal admin
istration of Santa Anna. As an older and better organized
"Intendencia," Jalisco had had in colonial days an educational
development somewhat in advance of those of the border State
of Nuevo Leon. Yet after the storm of the revolution there
was little left on which to build. The City of Guadalajara, as
early as 1821, undertook to open a primary school supported by
city funds. Immediately after the consummation of national
46

independence, Jalisco became a sovereign state, having a
population of half a million inhabitants. Its constitution,
adopted in November, 1824, ordered that primary schools
should be established in every village of the state, and that
the legislature should provide a state-wide educational law.
At the request of the legislature, the first Governor, Don
Prisciliano Sanchez, had a law drafted, and on March 26, 1826,
the bill was passed by that body. It provided that official
education should be "public, free, and uniform," allowing
private schools to be freely conducted, with only such inspection
as would safeguard against infraction of the laws. Public
instruction was to be divided into four classes — one class for
the villages, one for the larger towns, one for the department
capitals, and one for the state capital. The law appears to be
rather a jumble as to requirements, as these classes, though
grading upward by reason of the additions to the course of
study, were also to be distinguished by the amount of the
salaries paid to teachers. It exhibits a striking instance of
the effect of old and powerful social inheritances, in that
different classes of society had different classes of schools.
The conception that some elements of the population were
better and deserved more of the Government than others died
hard. This Jalisco plan also placed the whole financial burden of
the schools on the municipalities. So there, as in Nuevo Leon
and elsewhere, two giant difficulties stood in the way — the lack
of funds, and the lack of teachers. Nevertheless, mutual
sacrifices made by municipal governments, and by such teachers
as could be had, resulted in the opening of numerous primary
schools throughout the state. The teachers were poorly paid,
and they were inefficient, but a beginning was made.
Schools could not, of course, be conducted without teachers
and without funds to support them. As one examines the
elaborate provisions for courses of study, discipline, organiza
tion, etc., which characterize this early legislation, and recalls
how it all fell to the ground for want of these prime necessities,
he gets the impression that it was the work of theorists. These
men were so busy with their dream of a perfect system of schools
47

that they did not stop to make the practical provisions necessary
for carrying on any kind of a school.
At this juncture, when the hopelessness of the situation had
been demonstrated by a few years of actual test, a remedy was
offered which the Mexicans in their innocence seized upon with
high hope. This was the Lancasterian system of schools.
Among liberal and progressive men in Great Britain much
good will had been aroused by the political liberation of Spanish
America. England's ancient rivalry with Spain, and in particu
lar the antagonism felt by many of her citizens toward the
reactionary policies of the Catholic monarchy, including the
long nightmare of the Inquisition, made the story of this
uprising of a whole continent to assert its independence, and
to align itself with democracy and progress, a most fascinating
one. English investors hastened to aid in the material develop
ment of these newly opened fields, and at the same time English
philanthropists and teachers concerned themselves with the
moral and social development of the Latin-American peoples.
In the history of almost every republic of South America is
enshrined the story of some man from Great Britain who
dedicated his life and his fortune to the cause of education.
This was rarer a hundred years ago than it is now.
Even in England, popular education was at that time in its
experimental stage. When, therefore, Joseph Lancaster pro
duced his scheme for making students teach one another, the
extraordinary plan soon had a great vogue. Its defects do not
need now to be pointed out. It was too much like the attempt
of a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps ever to attain
any solid success. Yet it did furnish rudimentary instruction
of a sort, with an economy that was amazing. And the
economy was even more marked in the matter of supplying
teachers than in the actual money cost.
This precisely met the situation in Mexico. Poor as were
the states and the municipalities throughout the young Repub
lic, it was, nevertheless, easier to raise money than to supply
teachers for the needed schools. Indeed, the chief difficulty
was (and is to this day) the securing of teachers for whose
services the people were willing to pay. It is said on excellent
authority that today in the most scantily settled communities
48

of Mexico, where the scholastic population is so sparse as to
make the sustaining of a school most difficult, it is easy to get
the citizens to add to the stipend afforded by taxes if only they
are assured of a competent teacher. The inefficiency of the
teachers was, perhaps, the heaviest handicap upon the public
education during these experimental years under the first
constitution. The plan of Lancaster was, as will be recalled, to have the
older pupils act as monitors and teachers of the younger. In
this way one teacher could handle a very large number of stu
dents. This mode of instruction was spoken of as "mutual."
Only reading, writing, and the rudiments of arithmetic were
attempted. These schools had a rapid development in England
itself during the opening years of the nineteenth century.
Buildings and funds were provided by philanthropic men, and
a large number of very poor children were thus taught. Later
Lancaster, who had proved to be as impracticable in the
organization and management of an effective system as he had
been happy in the development of a fruitful idea, emigrated to
America, spent some time in South America, and succeeded in
giving wide advertisement to his idea.
The Lancasterian system was introduced into Mexico in
1822. * It was at once seized upon as the solution of a situation
which offered a few teachers of real ability and a huge mass of
pupils eager to be taught. For the whole period under review
(1821-1867) it represented the educational activities of most
of the states. It had not only the merit indicated, of enabling
one teacher to handle— after a fashion — a large number of
pupils, but the added one of developing initiative and an
organic consciousness among the pupils themselves. In
Guadalajara was founded in the year 1828 an official Lan
casterian State Normal School, under the direction of Professor
Richard Jones, described as a relative of Joseph Lancaster.
Special provision was made to secure the attendance of the

*The Sociedad Lancasteriana was founded in Mexico City in the year 1822 as a result of the
strong impression produced by articles published in the newspaper El Sol for the diffusion of
the system of Lancaster. The first schools were immediately started at Mexico City, and an
effort was made to develop one of the schools as a Normal for the training of teachers for all
the country. — E. A. C (See the History of Mexican Education from the Beginnings till 1900,
by Ezequiel A. Chavez, in Vol. II of Mexico: Its Social Evolution.)
49

rural teachers, their expense of travel and board being paid out
of public funds. The school had a brief history only, and
disappeared during the political convulsions of the early
thirties. Another phase of the educational history of the period under
review deserves separate mention. It was contemporary with,
though perhaps a little slower and later than the Lancasterian
movement, and had to do with higher education as that with
lower. This was the gradual emergence of the central state
schools called "Institutos."
The Jesuits, as we have seen, had looked upon the higher
education as their special province. The nucleus of a univer
sity according to Jesuit practice is always a theological semi
nary. The course of development then is to add, as time goes
by and means are afforded, schools of jurisprudence, of medicine,
and finally of philosophy. This latter meant, of course, the
scholastic philosophy; and such a school was still a good
distance removed from a college of liberal arts. It was,
however, the only thing even remotely resembling it in the
colonial days of Mexico.
In 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from Mexico, as well as
from all other parts of the Spanish kingdom, by an order of
King Charles III. Their extensive libraries, school buildings,
mission stations, and other properties were confiscated. The
society had been popular in Mexico, and their sudden exile
outraged and astounded the people. The institutions for
higher learning which they had established in practically every
leading city of the country, were taken over by the Crown.
The theological work was at once placed in the hands of the
secular clergy of the Church, but the schools of jurisprudence,
medicine, and philosophy passed under state control. In
many of the states of Mexico today the "Instituto" will be
found housed in some old building near or on an open square
called "Plaza de la Compania," that is, of the Company of
Jesus. These institutions had then varying fortunes, according
to the stability of the funds upon which they depended, the
zeal of local government officials, the ability of the men directing
the schools, and so on. The professional schools fared best,
as they dealt in living needs and ministered to present demands.
50

The faculties of philosophy, of the "college proper," as the
phrase sometimes goes in our own day and land, tended strongly
to dry up. Nobody was greatly interested in scholastic
philosophy. Yet these higher schools furnished a nucleus and a sugges
tion. Though of little importance during the later colonial
period, very early in the course of the independent history of
the states they began to be revived and reformed into "Insti
tutos." Far-seeing leaders perceived in them the promise of
valuable service. With liberty from the Inquisition, and
from the intervention of ecclesiastics in governmental affairs,
books began to pour into the country. The young men were
reading. They were demanding to know. They were calling
for guidance. Why should not the states themselves provide
it in these same "Institutos"?
The breach that fifty years before had been opened between
them and the theological seminaries was now widened. The
country was still orthodox. Even the republican constitution
had sought to perpetuate a state church. But the books which
were now read by the teachers and pupils of these institutes
were precisely those that orthodoxy could not tolerate. They
were the caustic, dissolvent, irreverent, even atheistical essays
of the French philosophers, who had reacted against Ultramon-
tanism, in Church and State.
It would scarcely be possible to overestimate the influence
of this irruption of French ideas among the youth of Mexico,
or of the "Institutos" as affording centers for the men who
entertained them and asylums for the ideas themselves. These
men were comparatively few in number. Most of them were
identified with the recently introduced Masonic lodges, and
this fact, along with the objectionable literature which they
read and the revolutionary political ideas which they were
suspected of entertaining, made it hard for them to avoid open
conflict with the jealous and watchful hierarchy of the Church.
A thorny and contradictory public question made the situa
tion all the more acute. This was the matter of ecclesiastical
patronage. Since the patronage of Mexico had belonged to
the Spanish Crown, and since the Pope had anathematized the
revolutionary movement in Mexico, a situation had arisen
51

which nobody could disentangle. Mexico was still loyal to
the Church. The clergy maintained under the Republic their
special exemptions (fueros), and all other religions were out
lawed. The vast properties held under mortmain were as yet
undisturbed. But neither the King of Spain nor the Pope
would recognize Mexican independence. The Pope yielded
first, because the Mexican Government was about to lay hands
on the patronage of the Mexican Church. All this gave the
revolutionary spirits an excellent pretext for launching a
radical program. "Let us have separation between Church
and State," they said; "let us abolish these special courts of
the clergy, and make them amenable to law; and let us
disentail these huge holdings of land, and see that they are
distributed and made productive." Such were the proposals,
held, if not clearly enunciated, by a group of men who rallied
as early as 1833 about Valentin Gomez Farias, then Vice-
President, a man destined to become an outstanding figure in
the later stirring scenes of his country's history. It was in
those same years that the young Indian, Benito Juarez, was
breaking the intellectual shackles of the Jesuit seminary in
Oaxaca, and was assisting in the revival of the Instituto there,
an enterprise which later, as governor and president, he ever
continued to cherish.
Against this menace the Church leaders promptly appealed
to the Army. Its officers enjoyed fueros also, and its spirit
was instinctively conservative. Besides, the huge mass of the
people could understand nothing of these new and shocking
ideas. They got their instruction and their mental guidance
almost wholly from the priests, who began freely to use pulpit,
confessional, and social circle to discredit and outlaw this
republicanism which was bruited about. The liberals were
overwhelmed. Santa Anna came upon the scene at this
juncture as champion of both Church and Army. Gomez
Farias was banished; despite the fact that a moderate party
had been formed to mediate between the extremists of both
wings, and had received his support, along with that of other
able liberals.
In this period 1835 to 1855, the national Government was,
most of the time, Centralist. Until the year 1842 the matter of
52

schools continued to be left to the states — called in those days
Departamentos — which seem usually to have left it to the
municipalities. In some of the capitals there was vigorous
activity, under the lead, as a rule, of some one man, who as
governor, state superintendent, inspector, or private citizen,
devoted himself unselfishly to the cause. In Guadalajara
statistics show that under the guidance of a board of education
organized as early as 1837, of which Mr. Lopez Cotilla was the
dominating spirit, there was maintained a system of primary
schools. In 1839 there were in the city and its suburbs twenty-
two such schools, twelve in the city proper. There was an
attendance of 2,469 pupils, and the year's outlay was $10,448.
In the year 1842 the Centralist government, at the time
directed by Santa Anna, undertook at last to further primary
education. An elaborate decree was issued, providing for a
central Lancasterian board in Mexico City, which should have
the exclusive right to prepare and license teachers, and for
departmental boards subordinate to it. Governors of the
Departments were required to establish at least one school for
boys and one for girls for every ten thousand inhabitants, and
were authorized to levy a special tax of one real (12J^ cents)
on each head of a family. One per cent of this was to go to
the central board. Attendance was to be obligatory, and the
course of studies was prescribed. It embraced reading,
writing, the four primary rules of arithmetic, and Christian
doctrine. The whole system was placed under the patronage
of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
This proved to be another paper public school system. The
upheaval consequent upon the war with the United States
invalidated the little that had been done in the interval to
set the system in operation. Professor Martinez says very
bluntly that it was a system based so completely upon the
conceptions and ideals of colonial days that it failed to appeal
to the educational leaders throughout the country. What
with being rigidly centralized and also subordinated to the
dictates of the clergy, it lacked the atmosphere of freedom and
of spontaneity which alone could win the co-operation of the
men who were devoting their lives to the cause of education.
53

It had one noteworthy effect, which was to strengthen the
position of the Lancasterian boards. These, both the national
board and those of the Departments, had become more or less
autonomous corporations, and after the usual manner of
corporations they had begun industriously to extend their
power. This temporary legal recognition gave them an ad
vantage, and they became so strong in some cities as later to
dispute with regular state boards over questions of authority
and administration. The Lancasterian standards were thus
perpetuated to the close of the period which we have now under
review. The American War resulted disastrously for the Centralist
party. At the beginning of the fifth decade, the Federalists,
after a long minority, again for a brief period secured control
of the Government. The sovereign states were re-established,
and the cause of education received instant attention. In
Jalisco, Lopez Cotilla, the apostle of public education, had
continued during all the intervening years, to keep alive the
work of the schools. Unconcerned apparently as to whether
the government were conservative or liberal, whether he worked
under a Department or a Sovereign State, whether the system
was municipal or general, Lancasterian or other, he fought
bravely on, devoting his life and his fortune to the cause of
educating the youth of his country. The measure of his success
during the trying decade, 1840-1850, is itself a criterion of
the man's devotion and aptitudes. When in 1855 he was
forced by ill health at last to give up his leadership — he was at
that time Inspector General of Jalisco, once more a Departa-
mento — he was mourned and eulogized by Government, teachers
and the public. *
The shameless dictatorship of Santa Anna, established in
1853, and his utter incapacity for civil administration, brought
the conservative party once more into disrepute, and augmented
the number and strength of the progressives. By 1855 Santa
Anna was banished, and a sturdy liberal soldier, Juan Alvarez,
was in the presidential chair. The constitution of 1824, though
it had been re-adopted once or twice at intervals when the

*Among other apostles of public education in Mexico during this period we may mention
the name of Vidal Alcocer. His humble and self-sacrificing, but wonderful work was carried
on in the City of Mexico. Cf. Chavez, History of Mexican Education, loc. cit. — E. A. C
54

liberals were in power, did not seem now to meet the needs of
the situation. A constitutional convention was, therefore,
ordered, and work begun on a new constitution. The radical
reforms which had been hinted at in 1833 were now to become a
reality. There was to be separation between Church and State.
There was to be equality before the law. Fueros, both military
and ecclesiastical, were doomed. There was to be a new
assertion of the Rights of Man. The venerable Gomez Farias
lived to see the fruition of his hopes. One of the finest episodes
in Mexican history is the scene when, supported on either side
by a son, he tottered forward to affix his signature as a member
of Congress to that instrument, one which Mexicans still look
upon as the charter of their freedom. The new constitution
was proclaimed February 5, 1857.
The clerical party, however, interposed a tremendous
resistance. Fueros and political prestige could not be given
up without a struggle. The three years' war that ensued
(1858-1861) was the bitterest in Mexico's history. The con
servatives insisted on projecting into the foreground the
religious question — on making it a war for and against religion.
The storm proved too much for Comonfort, who had mean
time been elected President. He gave up and left the country,
and Benito Juarez, who was at the time President of the
Supreme Court, succeeded to his position. This remarkable
man had sprung from a very humble Zapotec Indian family
in the State of Oaxaca. Following a sister to the capital city
of the same name, where she had work as a domestic servant,
he obtained a similar position, learning to speak Spanish after
he was fourteen years of age. He worked his way into the
theological seminary, passed then to the Institute, studied
law, taught, became director of the Institute, Congressman,
governor of his state, and later, as we have seen, President of
the Federal Supreme Court (then an elective position).
The Conservatives, with the help of the army, took pos
session of the Capital and of the central part of the Republic,
and Juarez was obliged, after a long and circuitous trip, full
of personal dangers, to set up his government in Vera Cruz.
It was from that city that he guided the destinies of the pro
gressive party during the bloody and fratricidal Three Years'
55

War, and there, at the height of that struggle, convinced at
last that such a step was inevitable, he proclaimed the Reform
Laws (Leyes de Reforma). This was in 1859. Fifteen years
later, during the presidency of Lerdo de Tejada, those laws,
placed thus irregularly in operation by executive order, were
deliberately re-enacted and strengthened, by vote of the
Federal Congress. Every year since, experience has served to
confirm the Mexican people in the conviction that these laws
are essential to their national well-being. This conviction is
now well nigh universal among 'them, though the resistance
of the Church officials has never ceased.
Perhaps it will not be superfluous here to give the summary
as compiled by Juarez and his ministers themselves, of what it
was proposed by these laws to accomplish. They announced
as their purpose:
1. To adopt as a general and invariable principle absolute separation
between state affairs and ecclesiastical affairs.
2. To suppress all religious orders for men, without exception, seculariz
ing the priests who belonged to them.
3. To extinguish all religious brotherhoods of every class.
4. To close the novitiates of convents for women, allowing no more to
enter, but permitting those under vows to continue to enjoy the income
from their endowments or personal gifts, with a proper allowance for the
support of worship.
5. To declare to be the property of the nation all of the goods now
administered by the clergy, regular or secular, under any title whatever,
as well as that held by convents of nuns in excess of specific endowment
gifts, and to alienate the titles to said property, accepting in part payment
for them certain national securities.
6. To declare that such remuneration as believers may give to their
priests for administering the sacraments and for other ecclesiastical services
— which if properly handled and distributed will suffice for the sustenance
of public worship and of those who minister therein — shall be a matter of
voluntary agreement between the parties interested, the civil authorities
having nothing whatever to do with it.
7. Moreover, in addition to these measures, which the Government
believes are the only ones which will result in the proper submission of the
clergy to the authorities of the state in all civil matters, while they remain
free to devote themselves, as they should, to the exercise of a spiritual
ministry, it believes further that it is indispensable that it should safeguard
in the republic complete religious liberty, and this it will do, both as es
sential to its own well being and as demanded by modern civilization.*

*Justo Sierra, Juarez, su Obra y su Tiampo, p. 153.
56

Juarez was a strongly religious man. He seems to have
been little affected by the materialistic philosophy of his time.
As Governor of the State of Oaxaca he had enforced the coK
lection, under the existing laws, of tithes for the parish priests.
It was, no doubt, a source of real pain to him to be placed thus
in the attitude of antagonizing the Church, which, as his
opponents insisted, was the same thing as antagonizing religion.
It is essential in the study of this episode to take note of a
distinction which was perfectly clear to the mind of Juarez
and his associates. Their struggle was against the higher
clergy, the bishops, archbishops, and others, and not against
the humble parish priests. The latter had furnished leaders
and goodwill in all the revolutionary efforts, and their sym
pathies were sure to be with the common people to whom they
ministered. But the hierarchy as a group, the successors of
the men who in colonial days had been counselors of the kings,
viceroys, visitors, members of the audiencia, of the India
Council, the Inquisition, and the like, held tenaciously to the
idea that they ought to share in the government.
An important element in the gradual clearing up of the
ideas of Juarez on this whole matter was his residence as an
exile for about two years in New Orleans. With him were
Ocampo, Mata, Arriaga, and others. They worked for their
living as day-laborers, Juarez as a cigar-maker. This was in
1853 and 1854, during the last dictatorship of Santa Anna.
Their observation of liberty in operation, and the consequent
prosperity and strength, made a profound impression upon
them. Thenceforward, Juarez never doubted that one step
at least was fundamental for the future of his country, and that
was the establishment of religious liberty.
Miguel Lerdo de Tejada was the intellectual leader of the
group of reformers who conceived, formulated, and popularized
the principle of complete separation between Church and State.
One thoughtful Mexican historian declares that the Leyes
de Reforma were really more fundamental in the evolution of
Mexico's freedom than even the Constitution of '57 itself.
This constitution had, however, opened the way, since it
omitted (for the first time) the article declaring the Roman
Catholic religion to be the official and only faith of the country.
57

Separation between Church and State is now so nearly an
axiom in democratic governments that it will be no surprise
to most students to find the Mexican people coming thus to
accept it. The confiscation of Church property which ac
companied this acceptance was less evidently justifiable. The
leaders of the patriotic party in 1859 offered several grounds
for this step. In the first place, they said, "these great prop
erties — the real estate especially — were largely acquired by
taxation. They are fundamentally national, because the
nation authorized the contributions which created them. But
they have been made unproductive by being withdrawn from
settlement, taxation, and proper development, and their
products devoted to the support of parasitic groups of men and
women. Moreover, the Church leaders who persist in opposing
the entire program of republican development, use this wealth
to wage their campaign of opposition. They are able in war
to employ large bodies of soldiers. Yet they have ever been
unwilling, even in time of foreign war, to contribute to the
expenses of the Government. Even now they are about to
defeat the establishment of a genuinely modern, progressive
constitution. They ought to be deprived of the means of
doing this kind of mischief. The liberal Government, on the
other hand, needs the resources which would thus be obtained.
It is the champion of the poor people, and is itself, after pro
longed fighting, distressingly poor."
Such were the arguments. Even before the Federal law
was proclaimed from Vera Cruz, these principles had been put
into operation in several states where constitutionalist gov
ernors had triumphed. Ortega, Vidaurri, Ogazon, and others
were already testing them. Lerdo de Tejada said to Juarez
about this time : "If you do not put into operation this reform,
it will go into operation of itself." It had become a sort of
self-evident matter with the leaders of the patriot party. But
with the meager facilities then existing for reaching and teaching
the people, and with the clericals more intent than ever upon
impressing upon their followers that the liberal program was
an attack on religion, the constitutionalist cause was not yet
universally popular. It was at last slowly gaining the as
cendancy in arms, but might have needed still a long time
58

before winning the goodwill of the people at large, had not
the conservatives made a final and fatal blunder. This was
the bringing in of foreign intervention, resulting in the tragic
"empire" of Maximilian. With this they placed a weapon in
the hands of the liberals which has enabled the latter to domi
nate public sentiment to this day. If the Mexican is incurably
religious, he is equally inflexible in his nationalism. Mexico
for the Mexicans is his creed. To this he adheres to the last
man. He will brook no outside interference. Louis Napoleon
got his lesson. American statesmen of our day may well
profit by it.
It has seemed worth while to trace thus particularly the
history of the triumph of liberal ideas, because of the direct
bearing which the political development had on education in
Mexico. For three hundred and fifty years that country had
been committed to one educational ideal, viz.: the entrusting of
the whole cause to the Church. Now she entered upon a new
path. Henceforth the way was open for education by the
State, and Church schools were to cease to have any public
or official status.*

*Since writing the above paragraph the writer has come upon a terse and comprehensive
statement of this transition, by Dr. Edgar Ewing Brandon, of Miami University. In his
report on Latin-American universities, issued as a bulletin (1912, No. 30) of the XT. S. Bureau
of Education, he says (p. 132, 133) :
"Up to the time of their independence, Latin-American countries relied entirely on the
Church for the establishment and maintenance of schools. The local priest had oversight of
the primary school, if there was one. Religious orders maintained institutions of secondary-
grade, and the colonial universities all owed their foundation to the Church. In the struggle
for independence the clergy very generally favored the colonies, for it was not Spain, the
Catholic, against which they first rebelled, but against Spain, the subject of Napoleon, the
man who had despoiled the Church and virtually imprisoned the Pope. The formation of
the independent republic did not at first change the status of education. During the first
decades of the new era the religious orders continued in charge of the schools, high and low, to
the entire satisfaction of all concerned. The State willingly granted subsidies for their im
provement and extension. But during the latter half of the nineteenth century conditions
changed. The idea of secular education which should be free to all and required of all, devel
oped in Latin America, as it had slowly developed in Latin Europe. Education for the State, by
the State, without reference to the ecclesiastical organization or to specific religious instruction,
was abhorrent to the tenets of the Church, and it resisted to the full extent of its power; but
in America, as in Europe, the State triumphed. Public secular primary schools were first
established, then high schools; and the universities also were in time wholly secularized. This
struggle long continued alienated and embittered the two powers, and the doctrine of complete
separation of Church and State gained added force. It is a bit fantastic that the animosity
should be reflected in school curricula, but such proved to be the outcome. Since the State
had undertaken public instruction, it must perforce make its schools popular. The Church
schools had remained classical and conservative. The State, in contrast, made its schools
scientific and practical. Latin was the central, all-pervading feature of ecclesiastical educa
tion. In order to discredit this education, the study of Latin was decried. Latin was the
59

official language of the Church; to teach it in the secular school was almost like teaching an
ecclesiastical subject. Again, if Latin were recognized as an important study, the state edu
cator could not compete with the clerical, since the best Latinists were the clergy themselves
and the members of the religious teaching orders; and to admit into the secular teaching corps
and to give Latin its pristine position in the role of education would be but to transform the
new secular system into the old ecclesiastical school. The outcome of the struggle was the
entire elimination of Latin from state-supported and subsidized schools; and when it was no
longer required, or even 'credited,* for the baccalaureate — a state-conferred degree — it naturally
disappeared from the private schools as well."

60

VII — LATER PHASES— SCHOOL ORGANIZATION
Summary
The civil wars of 1850-1867 were inimical to schools. An educational
decree was issued by Maximilian in 1866. This was nullified by his down
fall. The dominance of French ideas resulted in the adoption of the
essentials of the French system. The period from 1870 to 1910 was one of
rapid development. The Federal District and the States alike worked for
the promotion of schools. Lack of system and efficiency in municipalities
caused the states to be more active. Primary schools received attention
first of all. Illiteracy was reduced to 75 per cent or lower. Coahuila and
Jalisco illustrate contrasted practices in school management. In the first
the municipalities carry all the financial burden; in the second the State.
In 1906 the Federal District showed a school population of 11 per cent.
By 1910 the proportion in all the Republic was probably 6}4 per cent. A
summary of the situation in primary education. No special place has been
made in Mexico for the high school. Preparatory education may be looked
on as preparation for college or for professional studies. It has there been
given usually the latter meaning. The Institutos correspond to the French
LycSes. They offer a few college studies. Some of them included in
professional courses. Dr. Brandon quoted. Professional and technical
education has been offered by some of the Institutos. Engineering is
taught as well as law and medicine. Industrial schools have been established
by most states. They are largely for outcast boys. Normal schools also
are found generally under state control. They are related directly to the
primary schools. Their courses cover high school studies, with a few
added technical branches. They are attended chiefly by poor boys and
girls, and have to supply board and lodging as well as free tuition. The
University of Mexico was founded in 1553. It consisted of faculties of
letters, law, medicine, and theology. The professional departments tended
to absorb the others. It survived under the Republic till 1867, though with
varying fortunes. The professional schools continued separately. Recently
efforts have been made to revive it. Dr. Brandon quoted. Private schools
divided into mission schools, Catholic schools, and special schools. A
resume of the three classes.
THE civil wars that were almost continuous from 1850
to 1867 effectually prevented any formal and stable
legislation in regard to schools, and thwarted and
checked the zeal of the apostles of education who in various
spheres nevertheless labored on in the great cause. In several
of the states liberal governors sought, about 1859 and 1860, to
61

bring to the aid of republicanism effective school systems, and
laws were elaborated to that end. But the besom of the
French Intervention soon swept governments and schools
together out of existence. In 1866 the Imperial Government of
Maximilian issued a comprehensive, and apparently well-
considered, decree for a system of public education covering
the entire country. It was not carried into effect, however, as
the government itself came to an abrupt end early the next
year. An interesting detail is brought out in the history of
secondary and professional education in Nuevo Leon, already
referred to, edited by Professor Miguel Martinez. Touching
upon this imperial law, one of the historians states that it
provided for a division of the work of higher education between
liceos and colegios literarios. So far as I have ascertained, this
was the only effort ever made in Mexico to discriminate between
the high school and the college. All other systems there,
including that now in vogue, have provided only professional
education above the high school. It is true that the escuela
preparatoria, after the manner of the French lycees, often gives
a more extended course of study than our high schools. The
matter has in neither case been yet reduced to an exact rule.
Mention has been made of the influence of French ideas in
Mexico during the early years of the Republic. Since that
time French intellectual standards have exerted a profound,
perhaps we might safely say, a controlling influence, upon the
thought of the Mexican people. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century, a tendency was already manifest among
them to go to France rather than to Spain for ideas. This
was given a powerful impulse by the new nationalism which
followed the achievement of independence, and by the ill-
tempered refusal of Spain to accept the new political situation.
Within a decade the young men who had occasion to go abroad
for education were going to France, the French language and
French fashions had become popular, and the literature of
France, fiction and poetry, as well as philosophy, began that
domination of Mexican thought which has continued to this
day. It has been a question of congeniality, of intellectual
temperament. And in view of this, nothing was more natural
62

than that the French type should be the model for the educa
tional system of Mexico. *
The forty years from 1870 to 1910 were, for Mexico, a
comparatively peaceful period. Under the constitution the
states were sovereign in educational matters. The Federal
Congress legislated for the capital city and the Federal District,
as well as for three large territories. The educational schedule
approved by it had a measure of recognition as setting a type
to be imitated. But several of the states appear to have been
quite as alert and progressive in educational matters as the
Federal Government itself. During the long interval of quiet
and of rapid material development under President Diaz,
beginning especially with his second term in 1884, there was
ample opportunity for perfecting educational plans, both in
administrative and in financial provisions. The student of
the educational history of that period — of which there is an
abundance of documentary material — will be impressed with
two or three outstanding features. He will note, for a time, a
tendency that had already often shown itself — to reform and
rearrange with great minuteness the systems, both as to the
category and number of schools, and as to courses of study,
text-books, hours of recitation, and routine in general. It was
only after a good deal of further experimenting with these paper
plans, that it came home to legislatures and governors alike
that the really essential and fundamental elements of a school
system are funds and teachers, and that until these demands
are provided for, elaborate programs are of little service.
Toward the end of the period, therefore, there came marked
activity in the development of state normal schools. This was
the second notable phase of the history. Another, perhaps
even more transcendent, was the serious attempt to solve the
financial problem. During all the long period of the country's
poverty, due to the almost continuous prevalence of war, the
matter of supporting schools had been perforce referred to the
municipalities. The result was that the stronger cities and

?The French system prevailed, however, only in the primary and professional schools. The
Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, the pattern of the Institutos of the states since 1867, has been
(at least till within these last years) a very peculiar institution. It is the work of the con
structive genius of Dr. Gabino Barreda, who embodied in that school the main ideas of the
scientific classification as expressed by August Comte. — E. A. C
63

towns managed, by one device or another, to keep alive their
schools, no matter whether Centralists or Federalists, clericals
or liberals, were in power, no matter whether these munici
palities constituted a sub-section of a state or of a department.
But the villages and the poorer towns, poor in leadership, as
well as in money, did nothing at all. They had no schools.
The cloud of ignorance which darkened the country's sky when
freedom came still brooded over them. *
Thus it came about that the states found themselves com
pelled to intervene more directly in educational matters. The
municipalities were not only prone to neglect the work, when
pressed by poverty, but they were equally disposed when they
undertook it to go their own gait, disregarding any provisions
of the state law that did not suit them. It was easy for the
State to order, for example, that all children from seven to
fourteen years of age should attend school. Who was to see
that the law was carried out? Equal liberties were taken with
other provisions— length of term, courses of study, salaries
of teachers, and the like. The result was a chaotic condition
in many of the states which was the despair of educational
leaders. The more vigorous intervention of the states in the
educational affairs of the municipalities had thus its justifica
tion, not only in the supplementing of meager incomes, but also
in the regularizing and inspection of the work done. State aid
was extended on condition that state laws should be carried
out; and systematic inspection, the school census, truant
officers, and other machinery for enforcing those laws, came in
due course to be installed.
Following this general view of the modern period, we are
ready for a more detailed exhibit.

?AU the important measures were usually undertaken in the various states as a result of
federal initiative. This was especially the case during the last fifteen years of the Diaz regime.
Reports of contrary character may be attributed to a feeling of "regionalism" or "provincial
ism," of which there is all too much evidence in Mexico. At the National Congress of Primary
Education, held in Mexico City in 1910, Don Miguel F. Martinez showed that out of a total
expenditure for the current year of 10,261,240 pesos in behalf of primary schools throughout
the Republic, some 3,322,728 pesos represented the expenditure of the Federal Government
for the primary schools in the Federal District only. This fact showed the primacy of the
Federal Government in primary education. — E. A. C.
64

A— PUBLIC SCHOOLS
1. Primary Schools. Elementary schools have properly
received more attention than any other phase of public educa
tion. From the first the patriot leaders of independent Mexico
have seen that the training of all the people in the rudiments
of learning is essential to a democracy, and, being essential, is
the duty and obligation of the State. Most of the repeated
attempts at legislation, which our review of the century just
closed has set before us, concerned themselves primarily with
elementary education. The task was and is in Mexico a
gigantic one. Only a beginning has been made. Somewhat
pessimistic estimates, emanating from Federal sources, have
even in recent years placed the illiteracy of the Mexican people
as high as seventy-five or eighty per cent. This is probably
too high. The charge, oft-repeated since the passing of the
Diaz regime, that that somewhat autocratic executive and his
associates were never really friendly to the cause of popular
education, is vigorously repudiated by his friends. Senor
Chavez assures the writer that there is abundant material to
show that the efforts made by President Diaz and his supporters
in behalf of education were numerous and far-reaching in effect.
The history of education during the last ten years of the Diaz
regime has never been written, but the real leaders in this
field, among whom Senor Chavez particularly cites Don
Miguel F. Martinez, have always been ready to acknowledge
their indebtedness to the administrative agencies of President
Diaz for moral and material assistance.
Early in the present century the project for a centralized
federal system of schools began to receive serious consideration,
but its definite inauguration was constantly postponed. It
was understood that President Diaz himself disapproved the
idea. Since the passing of the Diaz regime, Senor Chavez
states, this idea has been revived, particularly in the matter of
establishing a system of escuelas rudimentarids, for the teaching
merely of the Spanish language, reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Such a limited program can not be said to constitute a system
of education. At this point it may be well to note the fact, which Pro
fessor Chavez considers of fundamental importance, that from
65

the very beginning of its independent existence, Mexico has
given to public education full recognition in the presidential
cabinet. Up to 1901 national educational affairs were under
the control of the Secretarla de Justicia e Instruccidn P-dblica.
By the Act of May 19 of that year there was created an indepen
dent branch of the cabinet, known as the Subsecretaria de
Instruceion Ptiblicd y Bellas Artes. Owing to its rapid develop
ment it was made a full secretaryship by the law of May 16,
1905. The recognition thus afforded the cause of education—
a recognition that in point of honor surpasses that afforded by
our own Government — is justified by the following figures, if
from no other point of view. In 1895-96, five years before the
creation of the separate department, there was expended
through the Secretarla de Justicia e Instruceion Publicd and the
Ayuntamiento de Mexico 1,225,248 pesos; in 1910-11, ten
years after its creation, 6,970,056 pesos. (Fractional parts of
a peso are in both cases omitted.) Of these sums the primary
schools in the Federal District alone received, for the respective
years, 414,675 pesos and 3,322,728 pesos. Including the
Federal Districts, the total expended by the Secretarla de
Instruceion P-iiblicd exceeded 4,039,000 pesos in the year 1910. *
Despite this remarkable showing on the part of the federal
organization, it is probable that the initiative, in primary
education at least, will continue to be left to the several states.
Even though the urgency of the situation following the present
state of disorganization may force the central Government to
extend its aid for the rehabilitation of the school systems, it
is not probable that a centralized system of control will be
adopted. That has been undertaken in some of the South
American republics, but the evil effects of it in paralyzing
local initiative and promoting paternalism have been patent.
Professor Ross in his recent book on South America points out
this as a mistaken policy. The relation of the central Govern
ment to that of the states may well be that which the better
advised state governments sustain to the municipalities — one
of cooperation, of supervision, inspection, and stimulating
financial aid. Such ideas were expressed in a report presented

?Data furnished by E. A. C from the official reports of Don Miguel F. Martinez and Dr.
Luis E. Ruiz. 66

by Professor Chavez to the Minister of Public Instruction,
Jose Vasconcelos, in January, 1915.
It is true that there has been no rule in this matter of the
relation of the state and municipality. Those who in the
future organize the public schools of Mexico will find precedents
of all kinds. An example is the work recently carried on in
two important states, Coahuila and Jalisco. In Coahuila
the municipalities carried the financial burden and enjoyed
practical autonomy, the state intervening only in the matter of
the selection of teachers and inspection. In Jalisco the situa
tion is reversed, the state providing everything except the
housing for the schools. The rehabilitation that will certainly
take place as soon as constitutional government is restored will
doubtless follow the lines laid down by previous study and
experience. The public school systems of the Mexican states
are not destroyed, but simply in abeyance. The national
educational conference of 1889 fixed more or less permanently
the schedule of studies and the standards of administration.
Afterwards there was progress, development, but no funda
mental change, until 1908.*
The system thus generally adopted before that date seems
open to criticism at one or two points. The attempt to finish
primary training in six years, for example, either puts too heavy
a strain on the average student, or leaves a gap between the
grades and the secondary school. Proper training for high
school students seems to require at least eight grades, meaning
in the case of most pupils eight school years.
In the second place, it is, of course, inevitable that the
rural and village schools should be incomplete. Often they
can not be organized to supply all the grades. It seems
undesirable, however, to make this deficiency a definite and
probably permanent condition by drawing in law a dividing
line at the end of four years. The tendency at once shows
itself to make the distinction thus introduced between "ele
mentary" and "superior" primary instruction one of quality,

*The last law of primary instruction enacted by the Federal Government in the Diaz period
was issued August 13, 1908. It attempted to extend primary training to seven years, and gave
an absolutely concrete character to the program of courses. It undoubtedly represents a
very considerable improvement on the standards fixed by the educational conference of 1889.
The influence of American models is very apparent. — E. A. C
67

not quantity; of kind, not degree. The outcome of this is to
give the student of the lower school the impression that he
really is not expected or encouraged to go on into the high school.
This is a situation that lends itself to the old discrimination
between classes.
A report of the subordinate official in charge of primary
instruction for the Federal District and territories giving
statistics for the year 1906 was issued in two bulletins in 1907.
Use is also here made of the report of the superintendent of
primary instruction in the State of Coahuila for the same
year, and a collection of statistics for the State of Jalisco for
the year 1910. In 1906 there were in the Federal District
367 public and 219 private schools, with a total enrollment
of 61,400. This is 11 ^ per cent of the total population. In
the District and territories the total number of public schools
was 557, with 59,351 pupils and 2,371 teachers. Adding the
private schools, the totals were, schools, 837; pupils, 75,865;
teachers, 3,458, and expenditures for the year, 2,250,000 pesos.
The same report gives the total number of primary schools for
the entire Republic as 11,519; teachers, 19,131; pupils, 738,813
— which is 5.42 per cent of the population. The corresponding
percentage is given for France as 14; Germany 15; England 16;
the United States 18.
In Coahuila for the school year 1906-1907 there were 226
primary public schools, with 499 teachers and a matriculation
of 24,056 pupils. There were also 57 private schools with
3,634 pupils. The total outlay from the public treasury was
$351,658 (Mexican), of which all except the salaries and
expenses of the state superintendent and inspectors was borne
by the municipalities. The elaborate and interesting official
report here referred to, shows the amount per student raised
by the different municipalities, and the percentage of the total
income of these cities and towns which was devoted to educa
tion. This percentage runs from 12.8, the lowest, to 91.2, the
highest, averaging apparently about 40. The table is an
impressive one for any inquirer who wishes some measure of
the interest Mexicans take in the education of their children.
In the State of Jalisco there were, in 1909, 1,095 schools, of
which 577 were public schools and 518 private. It is rather
68

suggestive that 190 of the private schools are classed as clerical
— "del dero." In these 1,095 schools were enrolled 102,060
pupils. (The report does not state the total population, so
as to exhibit the percentage.) In this state, as noted above,
the expense of the entire primary school system is borne by
the state government, the municipalities furnishing only the
buildings and the office expenses of local education boards.
The State's outlay for primary instruction in 1909-10 was
$524,310.50 (Mexican).
Senor Chavez supplies the following data concerning primary
schools in the Federal District, for 1910, the year which marked
the high tide in Mexico's educational work. These statistics
are obtained from the report of the Secretario de la Direccidn
General de Instruceion Primarla para el Distrito Federal, a sub
ordinate official of the Department of Public Instruction:
Primary Public schools in the Federal District in 1910  436
Primary Private schools in the Federal District in 1910  235
Total  671
Teachers in the public primary schools of the Federal District in 1910 2,559
Teachers in the private primary schools of the Federal District in
1910  973
Total  3,532
Pupils in the public primary schools of the Federal District in 1910 . . . 90,692
Pupils in the private primary schools of the Federal District in 1910 . . 21,386
Total  112,078
Total expenditure in the public primary schools for the Federal
District under the superintendence of the General Direc
tion of Primary Instruction  $3,322,728.50
As a special feature of the celebration of the first centennial
of Mexican independence, it was proposed to hold a congress
for all the primary teachers in Mexico. The Minister of
Public Instruction accepted the proposal and the first Congreso
Nacional de Instruccidn Primaria assembled in Mexico City,
September, 1910. At that meeting there were collected
the most reliable data possible on primary, secondary, and
normal instruction throughout the Republic. At the end of
the sessions Don Miguel Martinez presented a general synthesis
69

of these statistics, from which Senor Chavez presents the
following facts:
Total number of primary schools in the Republic in 1910  12,418
Total number of teachers in the Republic in 1910  22,009
Total number of pupils in the Republic in 1910  889,511
Don Miguel Martinez also reached the conclusion that the
percentage of enrollment in the primary schools of the Federal
District, 16.93 per cent of the total population, surpassed that
of any other portion of the Republic. While this can not be
compared fairly with the percentage enrolled in any of the
countries mentioned above, it ranks next to that of the United
States. This fact refutes any charge of lack of interest in
primary education on the part of "the associates of President
Diaz." Summarizing our results as regards primary education, we
may set down the following as the status just prior to the
recent political disturbances:
1. The leaders of the Mexican people, political and others,
are fully committed to the cause of popular education.
2. During the three decades of quiet, from 1880 to 1910,
the school systems took form and had rapid development.
There was so general an agreement as to type of school, courses
of study, manner of administration, etc., that no radical
change is likely to be introduced following the present revolu
tion. 3. The schools generally follow the French rather than the
American type,* although American influence has been felt
in the Federal District. The primary course is comprised
within six years or grades, four of these usually called "ele
mentary" and the two last "superior."
4. By common agreement these schools are "free, compul
sory, and lay (or secular)."
*The schools have certainly followed the French rather than the American type in many
parts of the country; but in Jalapa the German influence was important through the teachings
of the distinguished Professor Rebsamen; and in the Federal District the group of kinder
gartens created during the last ten years of the Diaz regime are rather of the type of the Ameri
can kindergarten, and the primary schools since the law of 1908 have introduced several
distinctively American features. This law extended the primary course to seven years (as
related in the preceding note) and pointed out the fundamental lines for prevocational and
vocational training. — E. A. C 70

5. They are sustained usually, as in our own country, by
local municipalities, districts, etc., aided by the state and
subject to state inspection and supervision. Federal funds
have been used for schools in the Federal District more specially
since 1896, which accounts for their exceptional progress.
2. High Schools.
Secondary education, the work of preparatory schools,
means one thing when the "preparation" is for professional
studies, and another when it is for colleges. In Mexico, and
under the French system, there is really no distinctive place or
institution corresponding to our high school. The French
lycee, preparing for the university, grades rather higher, f
including a year or more of what we term college work. In
Mexico the place of the lycee is taken by schools called institu/os
or escuelas preparatorias. These are central state institutions,
which should correspond to our state colleges or universities,
except that their grading is not as high. They are in grade of
work really not far removed from our standard city high
schools, and fulfill usually quite as much the function of high
school for the capital city in which they are located as that
of "college" for the entire state. Through lack of rigidity in
entrance requirements and courses of study, many of them
fail to reach the level of the corresponding French institutions.
They do, to be sure, attempt some college studies. Their
courses are a mixture. Many of the students are getting ready
for professional work, and shape their studies accordingly.
But, as has already been pointed out, the chief defect about
the plan of bridging thus the gap between primary and technical
studies is the fact that the primary courses cover only six
years. If students enter the high school after only six years
of grade work, the high school course must be graded down
accordingly. In the Mexican system the attempt has been
made to remedy this by extending the secondary course to
six years. The professional courses are lengthened, also, and
made to include college as well as technical branches, six years
in law and medicine being at times demanded.
How the problem will ultimately be solved can hardly be
foretold. The simplest plan would seem to be to lengthen the
71

primary course. Despite the excellence of the French system,
and the feeling that is gaining ground in the United States
that in both high school and college we are demanding too much
time for cultural studies before professional training begins, it
is likely that American influence will be felt in the Mexican
educational system of the future. Many teachers from that
country will secure their higher training in our schools, and
will, even unconsciously, adjust their work in some measure
to the standards prevailing here. Either there will be a sep
arate development of the municipal and private high schools,
or the primary schools will be made to include more grades,
so that the institutos and allied private establishments may, like
the French lycees, become a kind of junior college. The latter
would seem to be the line of least resistance.
On the general subject of preparatory education in Latin
America, Dr. Brandon, whose admirable monograph on Latin-
American universities has already been referred to, has a
comprehensive paragraph (p. 22) :
"Secondary education in Latin America usually covers six years and is
based on an elementary school course of equal length. In a few countries
the elementary course extends over seven years, and in some the secondary
school is reduced to five. The two school periods never exceed twelve
years, and in some nations comprise but eleven. It is not the province of
this work to treat of secondary schools, but in order to define somewhat
the university entrance requirements it may be said that the Latin-American
high school offers less in mathematics and considerably less in laboratory
science than the corresponding institution in North America,* but, on the
other hand, it regularly includes such subjects as psychology, logic, political
economy, and philosophy. In very few countries are the ancient classics
taught, but everywhere much importance is given to modern languages, and
at least two are included in every high school course that leads to the uni
versity. The secondary school curriculum is, therefore, comprehensive,
and the student should enter the university possessing a reasonably broad
mental vision. The age of the liceo graduate is about the same as that of
the American boy when he finishes the high school. The Latin-American
is perhaps superior in breadth of vision, cosmopolitan sympathy, power of
expression, and argumentative ability, but, on the other hand, perhaps
inferior in the powers of analysis and initiative and in the spirit of self-
reliance."

*The mathematical studies in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City have gen
erally reached from advanced arithmetic to analytical geometry and infinitesimal calculus.
The teaching of the laboratory sciences waB considerably improved during the last ten years
of the Diaz regime, often following as standards the institutions of the United States and
Germany. — E. A. C 72

3. Professional and Technical Schools
The faculties of jurisprudence and medicine were com
ponents of the early colonial universities. For a good while
licenses for these professions could be secured only in the
metropolitan university of Mexico City. Later, as population
increased in the provinces, charters were issued — in view of the
difficulties and expense of travel to the capital — for various
provincial schools of law and medicine. At different periods
in their history some of these faculties, along with those of
Mexico City, acquired much fame because of their members
who were men of real scholarship and skill in their professions.
It is not important to the present purpose to enter upon a
detailed study of these institutions, past or present. They
will doubtless continue to be developed, as in the past, to meet
the demands of a growing civilization.
Schools of engineering have not had so long a history.
Most of the states, however, have begun to offer courses in
civil, mining, and hydrographic engineering among the studies
of their institutos. In Mexico City a School of Mines was
founded more than a century ago. It has now become the
Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros; and has had an honorable
record, having sent out many famous engineers and mining
experts. Among them Senor Chavez mentions a most efficient
group of recent geologists, including many of those hydrog-
raphers who directed the recent drainage projects in the
Valley of Mexico.
In addition to their merely cultural work — to its subordina
tion, in fact — several of the state institutes have largely become
technical schools. An illustration is the 1908 program of the
Instituto Cientlfico y Literario of the State of San Luis Potosi.
It lays down a preparatory course of five years, and offers
besides professional studies for the following callings: law,
notary public, medicine, pharmacy, midwifery, mining engineer
ing, topographical and hydrometric engineering, chemical
assaying. The law course and the medical course each cover
five years; the engineering courses four years; the others, three
years. The document in question is merely the outline of
courses, and gives no information as to the number of students
taking them. The requirement seems to be that, with a few
73

specified exceptions, all who enter the professional courses
must first complete the five years of preparatory work. The
importance of mining and civil engineering in a country like
Mexico is manifest. It has not escaped the attention of the
legislatures there, and, no doubt, schools of engineering will
continue to be provided to meet a wide and growing demand.
Mention should be made here of the Escuela Nacional de
Bellas Artes, and the Conservatorio Nacional de Music, which
have had a long and noteworthy history in promoting archi
tecture, sculpture, painting, and music, in all of which the
Mexican people exhibit noteworthy talent.
4. Agricultural and Industrial Schools
These are classed apart from the technical schools for a
special reason. The Spanish hidalgo objected to manual labor
as beneath his dignity. In an issue between going hungry and
working, he would go hungry. This inherited pride has in
some measure affected public sentiment in Mexico. Agri
culture has languished and mechanic arts have stagnated.
About the only effort to remedy this has been the establish
ment in various states of industrial schools for boys, and the
introduction of manual training in some of the primary schools.
Almost nothing seems to have been done in agricultural educa
tion. In view of the richness of Mexico's soil, the demands
of a population of fifteen millions of people, and the peculiar
climatic conditions under which agriculture must be carried
on, the need for scientific agricultural training is self-evident.
The impoverishment of the country following the current
wars will make some development of this type of education
peculiarly opportune. Here, as nowhere else, Mexico should
learn from the United States — though even in our own country
only a beginning has been made. *
The state industrial schools have usually been primary
boarding-schools for boys. They are apt to be under military
discipline, and are largely correctional. Most of the boys are
waifs or delinquents, and they are occupied in such arts as

The real reasons for the poverty of the work done in agricultural education have been the
extreme scarcity of properly trained teachers, and the facility with which the soil produces
all sorts of crops in many parts of the land without extra effort. The old prejudice against
manual labor practically disappeared many years ago. — E. A. C.
74

help to make the institution self-sustaining, and at the same
time fit the students themselves to become self-sustaining
citizens. The writer has had considerable personal observation
of the Escuela Industrial Militar of the State of San Luis
Potosi, a school which has been in operation since the very
early eighties. It is housed in the cloisters of an old Augustin
ian convent. Carpentering, blacksmithing, printing, litho
graphing, and other industries are taught by practice. The
school does all of the state printing, lithographing, etc., and
also outside job-work. It turns out handsome furniture and
other woodwork. It is equipped with baths, playgrounds,
machinery, etc., and maintains an excellent student orchestra.
It is apparent that most of the other states have similar institu
tions, several of which have been in operation since 1867.*
Manual training has been generally introduced in the
public schools, but not greatly developed. It has been espe
cially insisted on in the schools for girls. The lack of suitably
trained teachers has, naturally, been the chief obstacle to its
development. Senor Chavez states that since 1867 Mexico
City has had industrial schools for both boys and girls that are
not correctional. The school for girls had an enrolment of
more than a thousand during the last years of the Diaz regime.
At the same time several primary schools in Mexico City gave
some vocational training.
5. Normal Schools
Any view of the educational situation in Mexico, past or
present, is sure to bring out in strong relief two of its perennial
needs, namely, money and teachers. As concerns the public
school system, these are fundamentally one, since the training
of additional teachers has long been purely a question of more
funds. The state normal schools, as a part of the public school
system developed during the last four decades, concern them-

*The State of Chihuahua had such a school under the progressive administration of Gov
ernor Ahumada. Professor Cox, who visited the school in 1898 and describes it in the San
Antonio Express for August 26 of that year, was informed that this and other schools of the
state had at first followed the example set by the mission schools maintained in Chihuahua by
the Congregational Church; but when the state officials subsidized these state schools liberally,
they soon surpassed their church models in material equipment and in number of students. —
I. J. C 75

selves only with the training of teachers for primary schools.
The normal schools are thus properly looked upon as an integral
part of the primary school system. Most of the states have
now provided such institutions. Zacatecas and San Luis
Potosi dispute between them the primacy in time. Vera
Cruz was very early given a place of promise, through the work
of Professor Enrique C. Rebsamen, who was later attached
to the Department of Public Instruction.
It will be recalled that once or twice during the period
covered by the Lancasterian system, provision was made for a
kind of normal training for teachers. The central governing
board at Mexico City had a school there, and several of the
state boards followed its example. Mention has already been
made of the provisions for free scholarships in a Lancasterian
normal school made by a very early law of the State of Jalisco.
But official normal training did not begin to assume a
systematic character till the time of the final inauguration of
republican government following the French intervention.
The more progressive states practically all began to make
provision for the training of teachers in the early part of the
seventh decade. It is needless to recount here the struggles
through which the normal schools had to pass, along with
every other department of the civil administration, by reason
of the impoverishment of the country during a long period of
warfare. Few of them made any considerable headway for a
whole decade. In the eighties, however, began their reorganiza
tion and financial rehabilitation. By the time of the first
national educational congress, in 1889, it was possible to reach
a measure of agreement as to courses of study, methods of
administration, etc. It is a matter of satisfaction that the
states have so generally recognized their obligation to under
take this work. Though even yet a few of them have not
organized normal schools, and though there is still among the
schools organized a good deal of variation as to equipment in
buildings, scholarship, and financial support, the system is
fairly under way. It is not too much to say that it is the most
vital element in the whole educational enterprise in Mexico.
Sooner or later there should be one or more teachers' colleges,
for the training of teachers for high school work, normal
76

professorships, etc. ; but the great task of preparing the young
men and women who are to teach in the primary schools of
the country must rest upon these state-supported normal
schools. Some of the Protestant missions have very wisely
devoted a part of their educational funds to normal training,
especially for girls. This work has been made to conform to
the official curriculum, and has been warmly welcomed by the
state officials. Nowhere, as yet, have the states been able to
train a sufficient number of teachers to meet the demands.
And in no part of the Mexican educational system can outside
help of a financial kind be introduced so easily and so fruit
fully as at this point. Additional scholarships in the state
schools or in approved mission schools would supplement
effectively the efforts of the states to meet the demands for
teachers that press upon them from every side.*
The course of studies in the state normal schools covers
usually four years, with an added year of practice, or five years
with a specified proportion of time throughout the course
given to teaching in model or other schools, t It embraces
mostly the same studies required in other secondary schools,
with special topics added. It will be recalled that the primary
schools stop with the sixth grade, leaving two years of grade
work to be provided for in the high schools. In some institu
tions a distinction has been drawn between training for ele
mentary work and training for teaching the whole primary
course, including the two years called "superior." A more
general rule is to require all teachers to take the full course
before receiving their title of "professor." This title is looked
upon in Mexico as similar to that of lawyer or physician. It
is at once a degree conferred by the school and a license ex
tended by the state. It corresponds to the "life certificate"
sometimes granted in our country. The close co-ordination of

*A college for the training of high school teachers was established in the Escuela Nacional
de Altos Estudios of the National University of Mexico in 1913. Needless to say the disturbed
condition since then has not permitted this brilliant and earnest beginning to be developed
adequately. A few well-organized courses have been continued. — E. A. C
fSenor Chavez reports that the course of studies in the two federal normal schools of Mexico
City has generally covered five years, not counting the practice teaching. The institution for
men, visited by Professor Cox in 1911, was adequately housed and well equipped, with a
faculty and student body apparently greatly interested in their work. — I. J. C
77

the state with its normal schools is shown in the fact that the
degree of the school is the state license to teach.
It has generally been customary to put the president of the
state normal at the head of whatever state organization there
is for administering primary instruction. This usually includes
a system of inspection, and sometimes also the right not only
to license but to appoint teachers. The system is an excellent
one when conducted by a progressive and efficient man.
Otherwise — when made a matter of politics, for example — it
is apt to degenerate into a travesty.
The scholarships granted to students in the state normals,
should, according to the judgment of those most familiar with
conditions, barely cover the cost of board and lodging. The
state usually furnishes the books and other supplies. Students
and their families should be encouraged to provide clothes,
pocket money, and other personal needs. It is true, usually,
that the students come from the very poorest families. The
well-to-do are not attracted to the profession of teaching: the
pay is too small. They expect to enter more lucrative callings.
Another reason is that the Church frowns upon these secular
normal schools as the backbone of the whole "irreligious"
public school system, which is anathema. This pressure on
the conscience of the devout results in a measure of social
ostracism, too; so that ultimately it is the very poor boys and
girls, with nothing to lose, who brave all and go to the state
normal schools.
The strong sentiment in favor of separate schools for the
sexes, which has long prevailed in Mexico, affects the plans for
normal schools, too. Nearly all the older ones are rigidly
divided. But in a good many places scarcity of funds has
made it so difficult to provide two buildings and two sets of
teachers, that mixed schools have been tried. These, apparent
ly to the surprise of all concerned, have been quite successful.
Only girls of a good deal of character and force would front
the prejudice and social pressure involved in attending such a
school. Naturally, those of sufficient strength to do this have
in the test shown also the poise and concentration necessary
to take them creditably through a new and trying situation.
78

One of the first measures to follow the present disturbed con
ditions in Mexico, as soon as peace is again established, will be
the rehabilitation of the normal schools. The people will
clamor more than ever for teachers for their children, and
they will refuse to be satisfied with makeshifts. The standards
have already been raised, and the requirements to be met by
one who assumes to teach are pretty generally known. It is
to be hoped that henceforth in politics, as well as in pedagogy,
the Mexican people will refuse to be satisfied with pretense and
show. With the debilitated condition of the public treasury
and the disorganization of civil administration, coupled with
reduced production in agriculture, mining, and commerce,
the states will face in this matter of normal training gigantic
difficulties. Help rendered now will be help indeed.
6. Universities
The University of Mexico, and that of Lima, Peru, were
authorized the same year, 1551. They are, therefore, the
oldest institutions for higher education on the American
continent. The school in Mexico has not had, however, a
continuous history. Opened in 1553, two years after the royal
authorization, it continued throughout the colonial period,
and even survived the revolution of 1810-21. From the
beginning it was occupied primarily with theology and juris
prudence, and therefore its faculty of letters became gradually
a secondary matter. By the time that a separate national
life for Mexico began, cultural studies were at a low ebb.
The doctor's degree from the University of Mexico had become
a matter of scoffing, and only the schools of law, medicine, and
theology kept their prestige. Later, theology also gradually
lost its hold, as the Church ceased to dominate in the Govern
ment; and only law and medicine remained. As these involved
professional licenses, they became in time the football of politics,
and thus at last the University fell upon hard lines. Once or
twice it was suppressed, then revived. Finally, just following
the French intervention, it was dissolved into its constituent
parts. The school of medicine remained, and the school of
law, and also the engineering school, but the University ceased
to be. In 1910, on the occasion of the first centenary of national
independence, provision was made for reviving it, but soon
79

afterward political dissensions once more began, the Govern
ment of Diaz fell, and the plans have since been in abeyance. *
Several provincial universities, were, as we have seen,
opened from time to time in New Spain. They survive now
in the state Institutos and in theological seminaries conducted
by the Catholic Church.
On the general type of the Latin-American university, to
which those of Mexico, of course, conformed, one can not do
better than again to quote Dr. Brandon (page 12) :
"It is needless to look for individuality in these institutions. All owe
their origin to the same influence, and their organization was essentially
uniform. The Church was the prime mover in their establishment, although
influential laymen holding high political positions contributed notably to
their foundation. The principal object of each university was to promote
the cause of religion in the colonies by providing an educated clergy
numerous enough to care for the spiritual welfare of the settlers and to
further the work of evangelization among the natives. The central depart
ment of the institution was the faculty of letters and philosophy, through
which all students must pass on their way to professional schools. The
latter were exceedingly limited in the colonial university. There was a
department of civil and canon law, but the former was overshadowed in
the ecclesiastical organization of the institution, and had to await the era
of national independence before coming to its own. The university usually
contained a professorship of medicine, but prior to the nineteenth century
it was the medicine of the medieval schoolmen, academic and empirical.
The one professional school that flourished was the faculty of theology.
It was for it that the university was created, and to it led all academic
avenues. "Clerical in its origin and purpose, the colonial university was also
clerical in its government. Theoretically the corporation enjoyed large
autonomy, since it formulated its rules and regulations, chose its officers
and selected professors for vacant chairs. But this autonomy was largely
illusory. The professors were almost exclusively members of the priest-

*In 1911, the function of the preparatory school corresponding to our commencement was
a brilliant occasion, graced by the presence of the Rector, the Minister of Public Instruction,
and by the then Acting President, Seflor de la Barra. Original poems, orations, instrumental
music, and even fencing bouts, appeared on the program. Each student received his diploma
personally from the Acting President. It is interesting to note that among the number there
was a full-blooded Tlascalan Indian, who received more than the customary share of applause.
In answer to an inquiry Professor Cox was informed that it had taken him two years longer
than the customary term to get the diploma, but that in recognition of his final success, his
companions were giving him what we should term "the glad hand." Professor Chavez states
that under the dictatorship of Huerta the authority of the University was considerably in
creased, but that since then it has occupied an anomalous position, at one time under the
immediate control of the Minister of Public Instruction and at another under that of the
Rector, according to the influence of either. — I. J. C
80

hood, and as such owed implicit obedience to the bishop, and, in addition,
the election of officers and new professors required the confirmation of the
prelate. University autonomy was, therefore, carefully circumscribed by
church prerogative, and its equivocal form of government has been trans
mitted with little change to modern times, except that the State has taken
the place of the Church. Several universities of the colonial era owe their
foundation to one or another of the great religious orders. In these cases
the order equipped, manned, and directed the school, subject, of course,
to papal authority and to the immediate oversight of the bishop."*
B — PRIVATE SCHOOLS
Under this head are grouped not only the schools due to
individual initiative, but also the two large classes of church
schools, those maintained by the Catholic hierarchy and those
established and carried on under the direction of Protestant
mission boards. Concerning the latter a brief monograph has
already been prepared. It seems to cover that subject with
sufficient minuteness for our present purpose, and it is therefore
inserted without change.
1. Mission Schools
Educational work from the first has been an important
part of the propaganda of the various Protestant boards
(mostly American) sustaining work in Mexico. These missions
were established, most of them, in the seventies and early
eighties. In those days there was only a beginning of public
schools, and anything that the missionaries undertook in the
way of schools was heartily welcomed. The people were
pleased, and even the Government looked with favor on these
undertakings. Mission schools have naturally fallen into three general
groups: (1) the primary day schools, (2) the mixed primary
and secondary schools, with both boarding and day pupils, the
work sometimes advancing to include high school or preparatory
grades, and (3) the special schools, usually normal and theo
logical. Of these groups the first gradually gave way, especially in
the centers of population, before the advancing efficiency of

?There is a profound difference between the old University of Mexico and the new one, as
shown by the spirit and breadth of teaching and by the point of view. It is the difference
between scholasticism and science; between medieval times and the twentieth century. —
E. A. C 81

the public schools. It is still employed to great advantage,
however, by many of the mission stations in the villages and
smaller towns. The demoralization resulting from current
revolutions will bring a renewed demand for this simple and
effective agency. The cost is slight — the chapel or rented hall
used for worship serving, also, as schoolroom, and a young
Mexican teacher having entire charge. These schools reach
children of the very poorest classes, the people who have no
social standing to sacrifice, and result often in developing
most promising material in most unexpected quarters.
Boarding-schools for girls have been especially effective.
Mexican families like to have their daughters in an institution
where they are both taught and cared for. These girls' schools,
of which almost every denomination sustains several in Mexico,
have succeeded in reaching well-to-do families, as has no other
mission agency. The teaching of English and of music, as
well as the scientific and modern instruction in other branches,
has commended them to intelligent and educated citizens.
They have been distinctly the most attractive institutions of
their class. The public schools for girls are generally looked
upon as plebeian, and the Catholic schools were rather in
efficient. In only a few of the larger cities were there private
seminaries. Thus it has come about that these schools have
been well patronized by people able and willing to pay sub
stantial fees for tuition. The work ranged from the primary
and even kindergarten" upward, rarely extending above the
eighth grade, and was projected on the American plan and, in
many instances, carried on in English.
Boarding-schools for boys have not been equally popular.
With the same outlay they might have done practically as well.
But the women's boards of the churches devoted their funds
almost exclusively to girls' schools, and there was no similar
organization to concern itself with schools for boys. Money
for such institutions was not easy to get. It was difficult to
make them anywhere near self-sustaining. Parents were more
willing to let boys take their chances in the public schools.
Nevertheless, not a few successful boys' schools were carried
on — combined boarding and day-schools, usually. They
graded up rather better, perhaps, than the schools for girls, as
82

boys consumed less time in music and other extras. Still,
very few of these carried any appreciable number of boys
through high school grades.
The missionary institutions that did this high school or
preparatory work, usually on the basis of the American plan
of grading (though the French system is employed by the
Mexican state schools), were for the most part those of the
third class, the special schools for training preachers, teachers,
and other workers. Two or three really excellent normal
schools for girls were developed. They adopted usually the
standard state program of studies, and their graduates became
accepted and acceptable teachers in the public schools. Of
these graduates there was never a tithe of the number
demanded. The training schools for ministers and other workers — the
sexes remaining rigidly separated through the whole course of
schools — have usually been compromise institutions. They
were designed to bring about prompt and practical results, and
their courses of study were usually a mixture of preparatory,
college, and theological branches, in such proportions as seemed
to the managers to promise the best outcome. Some of them
attempted formal seminary courses — usually, it must be
allowed, on a rather flimsy foundation. In others emphasis
was given primarily to the usual high school and early college
subjects. Such were the Protestant educational institutions in
Mexico. It is to be feared that the wars have pretty effectually
wrecked them, especially the most substantial and prosperous
class of them, the girls' boarding-schools. However, many of
these own valuable properties, and doubtless they will be
rapidly rehabilitated when peace returns. These Protestant
educational plants, especially the boys' schools, have exercised
an influence on the life of the people all out of proportion to
the money and attention given them. The number of real
leaders coming to the front during the present disturbances,
purely through personal merit, who got their training in
evangelical schools, is most surprising. It shows that had
Mexico had for the past three decades one or two genuine
colleges, their influence now would be decisive. Doubtless
83

the effects of the training of large numbers of girls are equally
substantial and valuable, though not so readily appraised.
2. Catholic Schools
Even after the revolution of 1821, the Roman Catholic
Church in Mexico continued, as we have seen, in a quasi-
official relation to the Government. Such educational work as
was undertaken for two or three decades was largely under its
supervision, and the teachers were mostly monks, priests, and
nuns. When at length the final separation between Church
and State was achieved, it was accompanied by collisions so
violent that much hostility resulted. A profound distrust of
the ecclesiastical leaders was engendered among the men who
were, or became, members of the Government. The Church
thus lost its place of intellectual leadership, and it has never
regained it. Its case in the matter of education was made all
the more difficult by the abolition of the religious orders.
The monasteries and convents had been headquarters for the
schools. They supplied both the teachers and the school
rooms. Deprived of them, the clergy were helpless. Practi
cally nothing was left to them but a few theological seminaries,
and in the cities primary schools here and there, and an oc
casional academy, housed in private quarters, or sheltered in
the cloisters of some old convent building that by private
generosity or governmental connivance was still in their hands.
Many of these primary schools, however, grew to considerable
proportions, leading in some cases to the violation of the law
in regard to persons under vows living in the same house.
The theological schools and academies were usually slenderly
patronized. During the later years of the administration of President
Diaz the enforcement of the law against monastic orders was
very lax. Troubles in Italy and Spain sent many monks and
nuns to Mexico; and the Jesuits especially went vigorously to
work again to build up schools of higher grade. The people
are even yet disposed to place their children in the care of the
Church. This is especially true of the wealthy families.
Hence all these schools prospered, despite the fact that they
were in a measure illegal. The expulsion from Mexico of
foreign monks and nuns by the revolutionists of 1913-1915 has
84

caused much adverse comment. But it should be recalled
that these men and women were in Mexico in direct con
travention of the law. Until the Catholic Church is prepared
to develop lay teachers, and to adjust its educational work to
the principle of complete separation from the State, and of
absolute submission to law, it will continue to encounter
stumbling-blocks in Mexico.
3. Private Schools
The demand for education in Mexico is so active that in
almost all the cities of that country competent teachers have
built up successful and lucrative private academies. Many of
these have been aided by the good will of the Church authorities.
Their claim on public attention has been partly in their select
quality, partly in their emphasis on religion, but mostly in the
superior ability of their teachers. Like private schools else
where, they have tended to rise and fall with the personality
of the teachers who built them up.
Another distinct class of schools has attained a considerable
measure of success, especially in the larger cities — the com
mercial school or business "college." Like its counterpart
among us, this school has offered a course combining theory
and practice, and has reached a standard of efficiency that
could be taken as a measure of the competence and con
scientiousness of the principal. Nearly all these schools
emphasize — besides the usual bookkeeping, shorthand, and
typewriting — the study of arithmetic and of English. As
promising an easy road for young fellows into salaried positions,
they have been well patronized.

85

VIII — ADDITIONAL TOPICS
Summary
Three topics are considered: revenues, supply of teachers, demand for
education. The public income in Mexico has suffered from a defective
system of taxation rather than from want of resources. The country is
rich, and with a proper administration will be independent. There will
be no lack of teachers. In spite of the low wages, boys and girls of the
poor class better themselves financially by teaching, and improve their
social standing, too. Candidates will be numerous enough, but nearly
all will need financial help. The present revolution has been a great
national awakener. The people feel their ignoranee, and are amazed by
it. They will clamor for schools for their children.
1. Public Revenues
It will not have escaped observation, throughout our study,
that the severest handicap on education in Mexico has been lack
of funds, although Mexico is a country rich in natural resources,
and by no means over-populated. But from the beginning
of its history it has been exploited. Unjust systems of taxation
and dishonest administration together have deprived the
public revenues of their just share of the country's products.
By the same token inordinate measures of those products have
flowed into private channels.
In the very beginning a current form of favoritism to the
colonists whom the King of Spain especially wished to reward,
was to exempt their properties from taxation. Many large
estates thus came to yield nothing to the public. In a brief
period also the ecclesiastical orders and the various dioceses
were among the large property-holders, their possessions, of
course, being likewise exempt. In the same way mines just
opened were favored, and farms that had not yet, according
to their owners, become productive. Thus during all the
colonial period the wealthy escaped, and all the burden of
raising revenue fell upon the poor. Since the establishment of
the Republic there has been no great improvement. To
encourage new enterprises — factories, railways, and the like —
many corporations have been relieved of taxation, for long
86

periods of time. The state legislatures have been usually
under the control of the men who own the large landed estates.
The consequence has been that it has been almost impossible
to secure the passage of laws taxing land. Through one
pretext or another — usually on the ground that the land is
not yet sufficiently improved to produce a surplus — the large
haciendas have been allowed to go practically free. Even
stamp acts and other devices for producing internal revenue
can be evaded if there is connivance between the local officers
and the citizens. It is upon commerce, upon the small com
merce of the poor, especially, that the burden has usually fallen.
The poor of Mexico are very poor. It is impossible to
wring from them large amounts, no matter how they are taxed.
Unless there is to be a successful attempt at making the wealth
of the country contribute to the country's support, public
service in education and elsewhere will be cramped in the
future as it has been in the past. The recent wars have
impoverished the whole country. Much property has been
dissipated, a great deal taken out of the Republic. Recovery
will be slow. Yet there is reason to believe that the people
of Mexico have at last learned by experience. All signs point
to a readjustment in this matter of taxation, once peace is
re-established. There is every reason to expect that with such a readjust
ment, and with time given for the rehabilitation of industry,
revenue for the needs of the people will be ample. In the
interval, however, it is evident that outside financial help will
be not only welcome, but most fruitful and efficient.
2. The Supply of Public School Teachers
It has already been brought out that in Mexico state normal
schools must find their students among the poor. These
schools have been subjected to a sort of double pressure. On
one hand the Church influence has been thrown against them.
Many of their teachers have been extreme liberals. It is
difficult in that country to cherish such sentiments and remain
in good standing as a Catholic. Often these teachers solve
the problem by breaking with the Church entirely. They are
thereupon ranked as skeptics, infidels, and even atheists, and
87

parents are warned against sending their sons and daughters
to the schools in which such men teach. So heavy is the
pressure that the young people who persist in going are virtually
excommunicated. Naturally in that case they follow the
example of their teachers, and become pronounced unbelievers.
They do this not so much out of choice, as making a virtue of
necessity. It is a necessity that seems peculiarly deplorable in
the case of the young women. *
On another side is the social pressure. People who feel
themselves to be of the "upper class" do not like to associate
with their inferiors. The state normal schools, like the public
primary schools, have appealed especially to the poor, the
people who are unable financially to take advantage of private
institutions. This has made a sort of social atmosphere, the
tendency of which is to restrict the attendance upon state
normals to representatives of families that have virtually no
social standing. Yet the instinctive attitude of the Mexican
mind is one of respect for teachers. The calling is honored in
and for itself. And even the slender income of a public school
teacher is greater than the usual earnings of the men and women
in the poor families from which these boys and girls come. It
is clear, therefore, that despite the religious difficulty, the
young women and young men of those families that are at the
bottom of the social scale will continue to enter gladly upon the
career of teaching. It not only satisfies their intellectual
cravings for an education, but increases their income and,
ultimately, improves their social position, f
It would seem that this so-called lower class affords material
as promising as any other in the Republic. Indeed, these boys
and girls may be superior to those of the "better class." They

*This is not the case, however, in the schools of Mexico City. There is no general sentiment
on the part of Catholics against the normal schools, although these schools are really non-
sectarian. It must be added that the teachers, particularly in the Normal School for Girls,
are almost invariably deeply respectful toward all the creeds, and that in recent years Catholic
and Protestant girls have taken their studies in the Normal Schools of Mexico City in a mutual
and constant relation of genuine cordiality. — E. A. C.
fThis observation also is not strictly true of the schools in Mexico City. As a matter of
fact there are in the private schools boys and girls of the richest families, with many of the
middle class and a few of the poorer. On the contrary there are in the public schools of all
grades, and particularly in the preparatory school and in the Normal School for Girls, rep
resentatives of all three classes. It is true, however, that the Normal School for Boys has
practically only very poor students.— E. A. C. 88

possess more physical stamina, as a rule, a more vigorous will,
and a more open mind. They have fewer prejudices of which
to divest themselves, and have all to gain and nothing to
lose by devoting themselves whole-heartedly to their chosen
calling. Needless to add, the supply of them is inexhaustible.
Mexico will never want for teachers, if only provision can be
made for their proper training.
3. The Demand for Education
It may be assumed that Mexico is awake today as never
before. The rapid shifting about of the men in the armies —
followed by numerous women and children — has itself broken
up provinciality and given large segments of Mexico's popula
tion their first conception of their own country, and of the
world at large. Telegraphic communication has become a
commonplace. It has brought the people of all parts of
Mexico into touch with the whole Republic, and even with the
world beyond. Newspapers have gone everywhere, loaded
with startling and critical news. The man that could not read
has felt himself set aside, ignored. He sees himself falling
behind in the race. He has never thought of this matter that
way before. He burns with longing and regret. He promises
himself that his children shall never be humiliated and degraded
as he has been. The school system of Mexico has lately been
interrupted and held in abeyance, but the whole nation has
been going to the school of experience. They have reached
the hopeful stage of seeing and confessing their ignorance.
There will now, therefore, be a new and mighty demand for
education. The transition is as radical as that which took
place in China when the old order of training was set aside in
favor of "Western" learning. China exchanged one kind of
education for another. Mexico will change want of education
for education, contented ignorance for an imperious thirst for
the things of the mind. She is the victim today of many ills
of many kinds. At least she is convinced that she has been
victimized chiefly because she is ignorant. The awakening is
a tremendous one. She is getting ready for that eternal
vigilance which is the price of liberty. For a hundred years
she has tried somnolence and indifference. Now she will
89

watch, and to watch she must have her mind's eyes opened and
trained. There have been, and are, many diagnosticians of Mexico's
troubles, each with a remedy. The American people have of
late shown much uneasiness under their sense of responsibility.
The Monroe Doctrine has kept them awake at night. But
they see that nearly all of the proposed ways of "intervening"
would do harm and not good. Outsiders had better keep out
of family jars. It is time that those who would really help
the Mexican people should consider the matter of helping them
to educate their children. That, if done in the right spirit —
that is, without sectarianism or partisanship — is an "interven
tion" that Mexico will welcome. And it will do good and
not harm.

90

AFTERWORD
WHAT, then, is the way out? What is the duty of
the Mexican people? And what is the duty of
Americans as their neighbors? It would be foolish
indeed to propose, especially at this time, a solution of the
Mexican problem, but it is not foolish to try to learn what
their history teaches us of their needs.
The Mexican thinks he wants only liberty and land, but
what he really needs is education. Though he has been strug
gling for liberty for a hundred years, he has failed because he
lacked intelligence and character. Universal education is the
great need of Mexico. It is the first, last, and only remedy
for her national disease — the only hope for the Mexican
Republic. Does the proposal of universal education for Mexico seem
absurd? Why is it more absurd than the proposal to educate
the Cuban, the Porto Rican, or the Filipino? It should not be
more hopeless than to educate the Indian or the negro. No
doubt it will require a long time even to start the necessary
schools; it will certainly be the work of generations to qualify
these thirteen million ignorant people for intelligent citizenship.
But education offers the only method of making men fit to be
free.* Believing, then, that the Mexico of the future must be
built by its people, and that they have little to contribute to
its structure but their native intellectual and spiritual abilities,
I have sought to get a just estimate of them from those who
know them best.
A native Mexican who was educated in Massachusetts and
who has taught in the United States as well as in his own
country, where he was head of a large college and superintendent
of public schools of a State, assures me that the Mexican peon
is the equal intellectually of the Italian, the Hungarian, or any

*Some paragraphs are used here from an article by Charles W. Dabney in the Outlook for
March 22, 1916. 91

of the other immigrants among us, and fully as capable of self-
government. A Protestant missionary teacher, who spent
thirty years in Mexico at the head of schools, and is now con
nected with one of our universities, testifies that the Mexican
peon has all the qualities for citizenship in a republic, if he were
only educated and given a place on the land. The super
intendent of one of the large petroleum companies of Mexico,
who has used the peon men for ten years, tells me that they are
as teachable, industrious, faithful, and loyal mechanics and
laborers as any men he has ever employed. The president of
the largest Mexican railway system, who has employed these
people for twenty years — as track laborers, shop mechanics,
locomotive-drivers, and conductors, as well as depot agents and
clerks — is warm in his praise of the common Mexican, who, he
declares, needs only an education and a chance. Many other
witnesses might be cited to the same effect. In the course of a
wide inquiry into the character of these people, the only pes
simists found were among business and professional men in
Texas, New Mexico, and California, who have come in contact
with the worst types of Mexicans — the poor laborer seeking
work, the border trader, usually a smuggler, or the cattle thief
and bandit. Those who know the common Mexican best and
in his normal surroundings, believe him to have the making
of a man and a citizen.
In addition to elementary education and training for
citizenship, Mexicans, of all men, need industrial and agri
cultural education. Although Father Hidalgo started his
revolution in protest against interference with his industrial
schools for the people, schools of this type have made little
progress. But they are the great need. Agriculture and the
mechanic arts in Mexico are very primitive. The rich man
objects to manual labor as beneath his dignity. Technical and
industrial schools are needed to overcome this sentiment.
And practically nothing has been done for agricultural educa
tion. In view of the richness of the soil, the wealth of other
resources, and the need of men to develop them, industrial and
agricultural education would seem to be one of the most
important tasks before the Mexican people.

92

Yet Mexico has no college or university of the modern type.
She needs intelligent leaders, but she has no institution to train
them. One of the best possible things, therefore, that could
be done in Mexico, while helping her to start her elementary,
agricultural, and industrial schools, would be to give her an
independent college of the type of Robert College of Con
stantinople. By independent, I mean a college on a foundation
approved by the people and the friends of Mexico, but inde
pendent of both Church and State control.
The advantages that would accrue to Mexico from a college
of such a character are too evident to need argument. Its
influence on education, on politics, on industry, and on morals
would be all the greater because of its independence. Only
such an institution would command the support of all classes
and parties. Only such an institution can train among the
Mexicans the wise, unselfish, and independent leaders the
people need.
We have pledged ourselves to lead the other nations of the
Western Hemisphere in making democracy a workable principle
of government. At our door we have fifteen millions of people
who, through ignorance and the habits that come of ignorance,
have failed to differentiate liberty from license and have sub
ordinated federalism to factionalism. Mexico can not have a
free and ordered government while the great masses of her
people are illiterate. A democracy must be based on an
organized public opinion, and such a public opinion is possible
only through a system of education which, while it trains in
the industrial arts, also disciplines the character and develops
leaders of scope and vision. The best aid one can give a man
is to help him help himself. The best thing the American
people can do for the Mexican people is to help them to educate
themselves.
CHARLES WILLIAM DABNEY.

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