José Joaquín de Mora and Britain: Cultural Transfers and Transformations

Chapter 2 Education and Useful Knowledge: Popularising British Thought

Mora regarded the spread of education as an essential condition for the improvement of society and the consolidation of liberalism. Like other enlightened and liberal reformers, he argued that education was necessary to fight against despotism as it could provide citizens with the intellectual means to oppose injustice and arbitrariness.¹⁶⁶ He recurrently claimed for the extension of education, and most importantly, he actively participated in the propagation of what he regarded as useful knowledge through his teaching activities and the publication of works with a clear didactic purpose.

Mora held several teaching positions at different stages of his career. In Spain, he occupied the chair of logic at the University of Granada (Colegio de San Miguel) from 1806 to 1808, he lectured on law and philosophy at the Madrid Ateneo in 1821 and 1848–1849, and he was the headmaster of the Colegio de San Felipe Neri (Cádiz) from 1844 to 1846. In Spanish America, he collaborated with post-independence leaders in the expansion of education in the recently established republics. With the support of Pinto’s government, he founded the Liceo de Chile, a male school in Santiago de Chile that he ran from 1829 to 1831. In Lima, he projected the foundation of the school Ateneo del Perú, a plan that never materialised, but he delivered lectures on law, logic, ethics, and grammar from 1832 to 1833. Furthermore, in Bolivia he was the headmaster of the Colegio Normal and held the chair of literature at the University of La Paz between 1834 and 1835.¹⁶⁷

For Mora, teaching was not just a discontinuous source of income since the spread of knowledge and the improvement of society are the central aims of many of his publications too. This is best reflected in the works that he produced under Ackermann’s editorship, which include five secular catechisms, two books on ←61 | 62→the education of women (Cartas sobre la educación del bello sexo and Gimnástica del bello sexo), and two magazines aimed at the dissemination of culture and science (Museo Universal de Ciencias y Artes and Correo Literario y Político de Londres). Although at that time his publishing activity was more intense than ever, he continued producing teaching manuals—Curso de derechos del Liceo de Chile (1830) and Cursos de lógica y ética según la escuela de Edimburgo (1832)—and promoting popular instruction through the periodicals which he edited or to which he contributed throughout his entire career.

2.1. The Monitorial System and the Secular Catechism

Motivated by the desire to spread education and reform their societies, the new independent Spanish American countries imported books, teachers, and educational methods from Europe, particularly from Britain, which became their “most obvious model.”¹⁶⁸ There were two key issues in this transatlantic transfer of knowledge and ideas in which Mora played an active role: the promotion of the monitorial system and the production and distribution of secular catechisms.

Spanish American leaders and educators regarded the monitorial system, also called the mutual instruction method, as an economical and fast way of spreading education in the new republican order. The monitorial system, devised by Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell in the late eighteenth century, consisted in dividing the classroom into several groups according to their level so that the most advanced students would become the monitors or instructors of the other learners. Its greatest advantage was that it enabled schools to teach a high number of students under the supervision of just one teacher, so it was soon ←62 | 63→adopted in schools in Britain, Germany, Bulgaria, Russia, Spain, Egypt, South Africa, and Australia, among others. This system thus spread all over the world in the first decades of the nineteenth century in what Caruso and Roldán Vera describe as “an unprecedented process of diffusion in the history of education, especially because of the rapidity of its dissemination and because of its omnipresent, ‘epidemic’ character.”169

The monitorial system was reframed in Spanish America and adapted to the needs of the national authorities that supported it. Bell and Lancaster first introduced this method in Madras (India) and London, respectively, to educate lower-class children and inculcate in them the values of order and obedience. By contrast, Spanish American statesmen regarded it as an appropriate method for the instruction of the upper and middle classes that could contribute to the formation of republican customs and the training of useful citizens.¹⁷⁰ The implementation of this system was thus linked to the need to legitimise and consolidate the new republican order, and from the late 1810s to the 1830s, it received direct support from political leaders like Simón Bolívar (Colombia and Venezuela), Bernardino Rivadavia (Argentina), José María Luis Mora (Mexico) or José Cecilio del Valle (Guatemala). Paradoxically, as Racine has observed, with their promotion of the monitorial system, these Spanish American elites were trapped in a contradiction between individual freedom and public order and, despite their revolutionary outlook, they were “deeply conservative” since they wanted to foster education to make citizens like themselves.¹⁷¹

Mora was familiar with the monitorial system long before he arrived in Spanish America. Between 1817 and 1819, he published a few articles on this teaching method in Crónica Científica y Literaria, including a sixteen-page supplement with an abridged translation of Alexandre de Laborde’s Plan d’éducation pour les enfants pauvres (1815), a book on Bell’s and Lancaster’s methods of mutual instruction.¹⁷² In this supplement and other pieces, Mora underlines the utility of the monitorial system to educate the lower classes and instil obedience, ←63 | 64→industry, and the desire for self-improvement in the students.173 This defence of the monitorial system coincided with the first attempts to introduce it in Spain since a school based on mutual instruction was founded in Madrid in 1818 under the patronage of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País de Madrid. Mora was personally acquainted with the headmaster of this school, Juan Kearney, an army officer of Irish descent who had been commissioned by the Spanish government to learn about the monitorial system in London and Paris.¹⁷⁴ The Spanish Crown supported this project—Ferdinand VII and his family even visited the school—but although both absolutists and liberals seemed to favour this teaching method, it was implemented only in a small number of schools as a consequence of the political and financial instability of the country in the first half of the nineteenth century.¹⁷⁵