The Realities of the Estado Docente

Abstract

Historian Carlos Newland has defined the Latin American Estado Docente or Teaching State as a centralized institutional framework built by national and provincial governments to provide educational services and define curricular contents. Newland situates the construction of this set of institutions in the first half of the twentieth century and considers that the factors that allowed the emergence of the Estado Docente were economic prosperity, urbanization, and the influence of Positivism and nationalism.1 With this definition in mind, this chapter has three objectives. The first one is to explain the official establishment of the Estado Docente in Peru in 1905. I argue that the national government—then controlled by the Civilista Party—initiated educational centralization in order to increase its political power. The second goal of this chapter is to determine the factors that made educational centralization viable in Peru. Relative economic prosperity and ideologies like Positivism and nationalism contributed to centralization, but I consider that civil society had a crucial role in the Peruvian case. There were specific social groups that favored educational centralization: the growing middle class, which anticipated expanded and better educational services; municipal teachers and educational bureaucrats who expected to improve their working conditions; and a new generation of aspiring educators who embraced the reform for ideological motivations and personal ambitions. Finally, in this chapter, I analyze the consequences of the process of centralization in the Lima region up to 1921.KeywordsPublic SchoolNational GovernmentPrivate SchoolTeacher CollegeExecutive BranchThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.