Gisela Daus
09/11/2021 3:01 AM
Clarín.com
Culture
Updated 9/11/2021 4:50 PM
It resurfaces in the present and reappears recharged. 133 years after his death, the figure and legacy of
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
(1811-1888) star in fake news and trends on social networks, even with his own hashtag: on August 23 in San Juan, Alberto Fernández compared himself to the educator ... and it was a trend; the next day, the opposition candidate Facundo Manes tweeted: “More than a year and a half without face-to-face classes. If Sarmiento got up ... ”. There was also criticism for the work
Víctor Grippo. An oven for two tables
, within the framework of Bienalsur, in a space of the Casa Natal de Sarmiento Museum and Library.
In this "Teacher's Day" in honor of Sarmiento,
immortalized and inseparable from that figure, myths and truths survive that we review here.
There are eleven keys, milestones, curiosities, and undisclosed or unpopular controversies.
1. An ideologist of Argentine education or just a manager who "imported" American teachers?
The files record the arrival of 61 teachers.
Sarmiento visited the most modern school in Boston in 1845, together with the educator Mary Mann.
She suggested that a young Argentine woman travel to study pedagogy and she also wanted to send a group of educated men of color to Argentina, but he did not accept, "explains the writer
Laura Ramos
.
"Instead," he adds, "he took the other initiative (to bring the teachers), which could have been developed between the two of them in the meetings they had at Mary's house, in Concord. Also in my book
Las Señoritas I put forward
the hypothesis that some one of them could have been inspired by an initiative of the United States government: to send large contingents of young female teachers to the west, to educate the people, to marry and raise families there ”.
Birthplace of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in San Juan.
First National Historic Monument.
2. Didn't create the dust cover
"Sarmiento had a wonderful idea, and that is for all the boys to go to school with a white coat, so that all social difference is hidden under that apron and they are treated equally," the president said in January at the Economic Commission for America Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) from Chile.
But that attribution of the idea
is an old myth,
its consensus and implementation took years of work after his death.
There are several versions about his origin but the contributions were from educators and officials who succeeded him.
Yes, it is an Argentine invention and its mandatory use was specified in 1942.
Overalls.
Photo Mario Quinteros
3. Innovative and modernizing patriot, admirer of the alien, or both?
“Sarmiento, self-taught and with a pragmatic spirit, materializes an avant-garde ideology from the occupied spaces.
She relied on ideas of an innovative pedagogy (as with the teachers), it was difficult for
her to be blamed for her foreign extravagance,
while recognizing that the education provided by the State is the solid variable that intervenes in development and social transformation ”, says
Beatriz Fainholc,
Sociologist and Doctor of Education.
For the historian
Graciela Queirolo
, author of the book
Women who work
:
"He was enthusiastic about the teachers because they were cheap and maternal, a wonderful combination."
A risk that paid off. “Sarmiento's project was adventurous, challenging: the teachers came to a country in arms, with deadly diseases, wild animals on the roads. They rode in rickety horse-drawn stagecoaches, they got derailed and they had to pull up their skirts and push them. They were Protestants and he sent them to Catholic provinces where they threw stones and spat at them. They did not know the language (except for two) and they still had to teach using it. The day that three girls had to travel to San Juan, Urquiza was assassinated. They requested an audience with Sarmiento and refused to go. He insulted them "with words that a gentleman should never say to a woman," said Juana Manso. At the same time, he defended them, paid them very high salaries and gave them very advantageous conditions, ”explains
Laura Ramos.
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento left education as a legacy.
4. The "exemplary" hero, but also the most passionate?
“His contradictory profile is controversial throughout his life with a lot of work, creating ambivalences in the mental representations of people, historians, political scientists, educators, etc .;
beyond its successes and failures.
An example is the success with respect to the formation of the people and the failure, when he governed San Juan where certain provincial disputes made him resign from office.
Or the doubts that his glory was the product of promoting primary education, when the work of the civil servant Avellaneda continued, and that he consolidated during his presidency (1868/74) ”, describes the expert
Beatriz Fainholc.
Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry
, academic and author of
Conversando con Sarmiento
, explains that during his very active life, “Sarmiento dealt with innumerable questions that related to the construction of Argentina.
In this task, he issued extreme opinions many times, making him a very controversial figure.
Over the years, his performance has been judged in reference to the situation at the time that judgment is made rather than taking into account the historical context in which he lived.
He must be judged by his enormous achievements, so many of those myths vanish. "
An image of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, as a soldier.
5. Did you mismanage the yellow fever epidemic of 1871?
Sarmiento dealt with an epidemic; Nor was he the last president to do so, but rather Hipólito Yrigoyen and with a pandemic, the Spanish flu.
These two historical errors of President Alberto Fernandez, in his speech in San Juan, right in payments educator, not passed unnoticed and through these false allegations, the hashtag was #Sarmiento trend.
Fernández continued: “Then it was my turn.
I think Sarmiento must have fared much worse, because he did not have the technical resources of medicine that we have today ”.
The truth: both sanitary efforts were dire.
"The epidemic", from 1871, by the Uruguayan Juan Manuel Blanes.
The authorities hid the first cases and then lied to avoid alarming the population;
The hero ordered the imprisonment of Dr. Pedro Mallo, Inspector of Port Health, for refusing to authorize the landing of a ship that had to comply with a quarantine that Sarmiento did not order, according to the Medical Surgical Magazine.
A "coward"
for the newspapers La Prensa and La Nación, he fled by train with a retinue of 70 "drones", as published by the latter and temporarily secluded himself in Mercedes.
On top of that,
Sarmiento was an anti-pollutionist, the equivalent of today's anti-vaccines.
“A young Sarmientina teacher died of yellow fever, another's boyfriend and thousands of others.
There was typhoid fever in Paraná - yet another, he died in Paraná because of that and so did his little son;
They could not be buried in the Catholic cemetery, they were buried outside, between bonfires and pumas-.
Malaria in Tucumán, which made another of the teachers sick ”, adds the journalist
Laura Ramos,
author of
Las Señoritas: A History of the American Teachers that Sarmiento brought to Argentina in the 19th century
.
The epidemic was reconcentrated in Buenos Aires, and after the four months that it lasted, causing 14 thousand deaths of the 180 thousand inhabitants that were counted there - as documented by the first national population census (1869).
6. Quite a seducer, what was his appeal?
Daniel Balmaceda
-journalist and historian-, responds: “Sarmiento was very infatuated;
From a young age he was seductive and reaped more failures than successes.
However,
already in mature age, due to his knowledge and love experience, he began to add more successes than failures.
He was not endowed with external beauty (this did not prevent him from attempting conquests even in cases that could be considered unsuccessful), but he was endowed with worldly qualities, which placed him in a place of preference and ended up being a weapon of conquest ”.
In his book,
What they had put on, he
investigates the patriot's “uncontracted” style;
adept at the European and imported fashion of mustache: according to stages and with variations, he wore a "walrus mustache."
In addition,
Ramos
narrates that the teachers “make all kinds of comments about Sarmiento in their letters and diaries, free of all censorship because they are written for their families there.
For example, Florence Atkinson says that Sarmiento 'doesn't look ugly, but he's very cocky.'
Former House of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, today House of the Province of San Juan, in Sarmiento 1251. Photo Luciano Thieberger
7. Education for all?
“I don't know if his objective was to educate what we now understand as 'everyone', because he was determined to exterminate the native peoples.
He was interested in educating the white or mestizo Catholic population of the capital and the interior.
A project, despite its unitary ideology, deeply federal. Rather Sarmiento wanted to introduce American culture, which seemed more advanced and interesting to him than the Catholic Spanish culture that was installed in Argentina at that time. There is a colonialist aspiration in their pedagogical desire ”, points out
Laura Ramos.
Fainholc
adds: “Although he recognized women as a diffuser of knowledge and places her in a relevant public space, he continues to think about the teacher and her feminine role in caring for children, in a selfless and apostolic way, without claims. So the myth of considering him 'father of the classroom' responds to a social practice and daily cultural battle, of the public school, he created 800, with his teachers, of great social recognition then but null today ".
However, he adds, "Sarmiento stood out more in thinking about secondary and higher education by creating two national schools and two normal ones. Likewise, he makes a dichotomous reading of reality, contrasting without resolution the image of a clash between knowledge and ignorance ( "civilization and barbarism") embodied, for example, in Facundo Quiroga. Which leads to little recognition of the original cultural heritage - pre-existing in the country; Indians, blacks and gauchos - who could not vote. "
8. They said "eat grass"
“Since he was a child, he lived in a house with a large garden cared for by his mother, Paula Albarracín, therefore his menu was very complete and balanced.
At that time the meat used to be accompanied by squash or potatoes;
he wanted
there to be a greater presence of vegetables
to accompany it and this caused some political opponents, laughing at this position, to create
the nickname 'eat grass' ",
reveals Balmaceda.
9. A believing Catholic but a secular educator
A curious and frowned upon fact is that
Sarmiento was a Freemason
due to the secrecy of those associations.
He approached Freemasonry seduced by their way of acting and the altruism of its members, but he also argued with them.
His first approach to a lodge was in Chile, when he was mature, and then he founded the Unión del Plata No. 1 in Argentina, of which he was a speaker.
Under the government of Bartolomé Miter, sent to the USA on a diplomatic mission, he represented the Grand Lodge and the 33rd Degree Supreme Council of Argentina.
Already elected, he exhibited at a banquet offered by the Masons of Buenos Aires in 1868 and after praising them he announced his provisional separation, while he served as the country's first magistracy.
At the end of his mandate, he would
return to his Masonic practices from 1882 to 1883, he assumed as Grand Master of that Order.
But after repeated disputes, that same year he deserted: he left fought and never to return.
On secularism and his conviction that education should be independent of religion was a fundamental part of the process and cost him great disputes with the Church.
"Facundo", by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.
10. Did you meet your objectives?
According to the researcher
Queirolo: “The most current legacy of Sarmiento is the state investment in education
through a budget, qualified personnel, and a building structure that would allow the development of public policies to socially integrate the entire population of Argentina.
A present State that invests in the education and training of human resources ”.
On the other hand,
Jaim Etcheverry
believes that "obviously
Sarmiento's aspiration is far from being fulfilled in a society that registers scandalous poverty
that is also manifested in poor access to education."
“Furthermore,” he assures, “the quality of education received by those who can do it is also quite deficient,” he continues.
His appeal to 'educate the sovereign' is as valid as when he formulated it convinced that civil rights, in its time in expansion, require that those who exercise them have the best possible education ”.
11. Die poor and exiled
Sarmientino specialists assure that he died in Asunción, Paraguay, due to health recommendations, -to benefit from the hot climate-, in a house that did not belong to him and that as he ended his presidency without having one of his own, he moved with Faustina, his daughter.
His grave is in the Recoleta Cemetery, since a friend gave him a plot.
"Without fortune that I never coveted, because it was heavy baggage for the incessant struggle, I hope a good bodily death, because the one that will come to me in politics is the one I expected ... And I did not wish better than to leave millions by inheritance in better intellectual conditions , reassured our country, secured the institutions and furrowed by railways the territory, like the rivers covered with fumes, so that everyone can participate in the feast of life, which I only enjoyed on the sly, "
Sarmiento
materialized with his pen a
short time before die.
That "Ideas are not killed", another premise of his, was recorded in the Quebrada de Zonda in his native province.
Mausoleum of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in the Recoleta Cemetery.
Photo Luciano Thieberger
Pc
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