An Education under Two Flags: American Sponsored Education and Pan-Americanism in the Western Hemisphere, 1920–60

By the mid-1950s, policymakers and scholars of U.S. international relations had begun to take seriously what was dubbed the “fourth dimension” of foreign policy: educational and cultural diplomacy. In Latin America, post-war investments in modernization programs overseen by multiple U.S. government agencies understood that the key to creating “good neighbors” lay in educating the hemisphere’s children away from “anti-American” ideologies using pedagogies that stressed the “progressive” and secular ideals of individualism and the free market. Crucial to this project were American-sponsored schools, private K-12 institutions that had long constituted diplomatic microcosms where the sons and daughters of captains of industry, diplomats, and wealthy expatriate and local families were groomed to be successful Pan American citizens. Though closely tied to U.S. embassies and financially supported and regulated by the Department of State, these schools also answered to national ministries of education, which at times offered competing pedagogies for cultivating the minds of its citizens.  

Drawing on case studies from prominent and long-enduring schools in Mexico City and São Paulo, the largest cities of the U.S.’s two largest “good neighbors,” this paper examines the creation and standardization of American-sponsored education in Latin America, a region that led the world count of these schools. By shifting the focus of histories of childhood away from the uplift of the urban poor, this paper seeks to locate the role of elite children as objects of and participants in contests of cultural diplomacy and national educational policies from the interwar period to the dawn of the Cold War.