Between God and Country: School Manuals in Social Sciences and Images of the Nation1

Abstract

A review of how the history of education in Colombia has been analyzed shows that the privileged sources for this task have been educational policies and legislation, along with the ideas and the works of teachers and masters, official statistics on coverage and growth of the educational system, as well as the school texts from the different areas that have formed school curricula. These texts can be considered to be devices that link together the world of social and cultural production with the academic disciplines and the complexity of school culture. In the case of social sciences texts, it is worth noting that it was through these disciplines that several strategies were created for the creation, promotion and dissemination of ideas on the notion of nation‐states by the national elites in the nineteenth century. The objective of this article is to present an analysis of the text Manual de instrucción moral y cívica, written by Francisco José Urrutia in 1907, showing how the policies of the Catholic Church and the policies of the leaders of the traditional parties created a conception of social order and disseminated it through school texts which, as in the case of the above‐mentioned text, were official texts, mandatory in the schools throughout the country, thus in one way or another contributing to the construction of visions of political culture. 1 This article is part of the investigation denominated Political Culture and National Identity Processes in Colombia During the 20th Century. Analysis of School Manuals, co‐financed by the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional and Colciencias, Bogotá‐Colombia.