Shaping a New Man: The Schools for the State Engineers in Nineteenth-Century Spain (1830s–1900)

Abstract

The education of Spanish engineers-civil servants became standardised since the 1830s, leaning on institutional precedents dating to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Henceforth, studies in a state-run special school constituted an important milestone and unifying element in the careers of these men. The education in special schools not only provided the future engineers with what was considered knowledge necessary for carrying out their professional duties, but it was also supposed to strengthen certain human characteristics desirable in elite civil servants in general, and corps engineers in particular. While some of these elements were introduced with more or less explicit intention to obtain specific results, others seem to have been developed as products of institutional dynamics or were combination of both. One way or another, the contents of engineers’ education, the criteria and methods of selection and evaluation, explicit and unspoken rules of students’ life, all these created very exceptional settings that shaped the young men into a unique profile. I examine how the different mechanisms of selection, evaluation and discipline and other elements of the school life in engineering schools besides the curricula, shaped the young men who studied there into a specific figure of Spanish state engineer, an elite man with a strong corporate (as in “corps”) identity, individual and collective self-confidence and a sense of entitlement to make decisions on behalf of the Nation. The conclusions discuss the exceptional position of Spanish corps engineers within nineteenth-century Spanish governing elites.