"Civilizing the People”: Primary Teachers and the State in Lima, 1860–1921

"Civilizing the people”: Primary Teachers and the State in Lima, 1860 - c 1921

Since 1860 the Peruvian government began opening “municipal schools” or primary educational institutions run by local authorities with partial national subsidies. The creation of these schools was part of the expansion of the state apparatus, led by an emerging bourgeois faction linked to export activities. This bourgeoisie sought to consolidate its economic position, securing its hegemony over local power-holders and subaltern groups, and building a national community that could face external threats effectively. Focusing on the departamento or region of Lima, I show that rising schooling from 1860 to the first decades of the twentieth century was not only the outcome of initiatives taken by the national government in cooperation with municipal authorities. Men and women who seized on the opportunity of becoming primary teachers, both in municipal and private schools, also contributed to the effective expansion of the education system. In addition, I demonstrate that primary teachers in Lima were a diverse group in terms of social composition and pedagogical preparation. However, throughout the period under study, primary teachers developed a growing professional identity, expressed through the creation of educational associations and the publication of educational journals. Municipal teachers were one of the social groups that most strongly supported the administrative and financial centralization of public primary education from 1905. In the same year the national government opened the Teachers College for Men, the first public institution of pedagogical training that operated consistently for an extended period of time. Graduates of Teachers College gave promoted the professional identity of educators, although their relations with other teachers were not without conflicts. Ultimately, the foundations of the Teaching State or centralized apparatus of public primary schooling were laid down together by the national government and educators themselves.