By the early twentieth century, migrant German children became vectors of knowledge migration while German-Chilean schools emerged as Chile’s leading pedagogical institutions. Almost all of the German communities that took shape in Chilean cities, ports, and rural villages after the middle of the nineteenth century went to great pains to establish schools on a par with those they had known in Europe. Even in the capital of Santiago, and in vibrant, transnational merchant cities such as Valparaiso and Valdivia, those schools far surpassed local institutions. Local elites, recognizing the advantages of a superior education, often sent their own children to these schools. The Chilean state, in an effort to foster a well-educated polity, supported the German schools directly. It also endeavored to extend their educational opportunities beyond the towns with vibrant German communities by appointing German teachers in other Chilean schools and by hiring some of the most prominent among them to create the Pedagogical Institute at the National University. That fundamentally transformed education in Chile.
Consequently, young migrants from German-speaking Europe were able to grow up as self-consciously German members of the Chilean polity and as Chilean members of an avowedly transnational German community. In part, that story is well known. Often overlooked, however, are the ways in which migrant children became vectors of knowledge migration, bringing their sense of belonging to multiple communities into their schools, where it circulated among German and non-German students alike. In addition, the schools, the sites in which these vectors of knowledge came together, offered these students access to Chilean and European sources of knowledge about the world, which became further material for their ongoing production of knowledge about Chile and Chileans. Thus, by the first decades of the twentieth century, generations of migrant children had become active participants in shaping Chilean worldview.
