Religion, Gender Ideology, and the Training of Female Public Elementary School Teachers in Nineteenth Century Chile

Abstract

After only five days she felt like a different person, so much unpicked and resown and made over to a different pattern…. Catholicism isn’t a religion, it’s a nationality. In her four years at [school], it [religion] had grown into every fiber of her nature; she could not eat or sleep or read or play without relating every action to her secret life as a Christian and a Catholic. She rejoiced in it and rebelled against it. She tried to imagine what life would be like without it; how she would feel if she were a savage blessedly ignorant of the very existence of god. But it was as impossible as imagining death or madness or blindness. Wherever she looked, it loomed in the background … the fortress of God, the house on the rock. Education became a responsibility of the state in Chile soon after independence. Scholarship has usually linked the expansion of public primary education to the broader liberal agenda of the secularization of society through the introduction of modern thinking, while the common curriculum became a tool of national integration.