Policy Making and Education in Nineteenth-Century Argentina and Uruguay

My study employs a transnational perspective to analyze the exchange of ideas that led to the creation of the public school system as an integral component of the nation-state in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Uruguay. During the second half of the nineteenth-century policy-makers created an institutional framework to centralize decisions on childhood development, focusing largely on education. By combining both, the debates and the impact of state policies on the ways children were raised, I analyze the ways in which the creation of the public school aimed to promote productive citizens. A close study of public intellectual’s ideological discussions and families’ everyday interactions with state-sponsored educational institutions reveals how the public sphere and educational ideas, as enacted both in the home and school, informed each other.

While previous studies argue that South American intellectuals blindly imported ideas and systems from Europe and the US, I argue that Latin American intellectuals participated in the Atlantic educational debate that characterized the nineteenth-century. In Argentina and Uruguay, policy-makers conducted a careful analysis of their countries’ resources before implementing their educational plans. Case studies of Buenos Aires and Montevideo demonstrate how local conditions--administration structures, gender norms, religious beliefs, and economic elite’s conceptualization of national identity--shaped the education programs’ scale and architecture and the emerging nation-state. This paper also examines the writings of the two most prominent intellectuals and politicians of Argentina and Uruguay, Doming Sarmiento and José Pedro Varela, to understand the larger national projects that shaped childhood education and political communities in their respective countries.