Monitors and moralists: the Lancasterian system of mutual education and the vision of a new moral order in Spanish America, 1818–1831

Abstract

ABSTRACTSpanish American independence leaders acted as both monitors and moralists for their emerging nations. Their adoption of the Lancasterian monitorial school system, along with their efforts to legislate new republican moral codes, revealed the contradictions that led to the failure of so many of that idealistic generation’s dreams. They could not broaden literacy without opening avenues of expression to those new voices and thereby relinquishing some measure of control. They could not make a place for lower classes, women or indigenous people in their programmes and rhetoric, without jeopardising their own privileged position. They could not quite determine how to encourage individual freedom while maintaining public order. The widespread introduction of the Lancasterian monitorial school system along with new moral codes for behaviour suggests that these elites had a revolutionary plan to refashion their society, but were also deeply conservative in their desire to make the rest of the citizenry more like themselves.