150 years after the end of Sarmiento's presidency, and 213 years after his birth, a disturbing situation moves us to reflect on his legacy and the link he foresaw between knowledge and the achievement of "man's freedom", the ultimate goal of democratic revolutions.
The planned defunding of the National Commission of Popular Libraries (Conabip), an organization created precisely in 1870, could lead to the closure of a good part of the more than 1,500 current libraries, which today barely cover their current expenses.
In a similar vein, the concern of the community of the educ.ar portal is recorded and extends to other “State societies”, possibly subject to privatization: the value of its pedagogical task of more than 20 years places it at the forefront in its genre, but its files have had to be safeguarded against a possible official blockade.
The cuts in other areas, such as the Conectar-Igualdad program or in TV and radio channels, are no less serious.
Finally, the stalkings resonate in fields as diverse as cinema and theater, the world of books or that of history.
The Argentine Association of Researchers in History expressed its concern about the budgetary restrictions "that will affect the normal performance of the national scientific system and universities" warning about the "drastic fall in the salaries of scientific and university personnel in all their categories" that would affect intellectual production, damaging “the fundamental contribution of the Humanities, Social Sciences and History.”
In May 1869, once “the internal turbulence that frustrated the purposes of the Constitution” had been overcome, Sarmiento proposed “ensuring tranquility, the only state in which a people can develop” and endorsed the impetus for the Industrial Exhibition planned for Córdoba:
“The means of communication between us are also part of a political system.
Our party can take as its symbol, a school, a telegraph and a railway, agents of pacification and order that are safer than cannons and penitentiaries" and advances "bills to give the greatest possible expansion to the dissemination of education among the classes and in the parts of the Republic that need it most.”
We need, he says, “a system of general education for all, that prepares us, as a nation, to call ourselves and actually be a civilized people” and he adds: “I have added to the public education budget an Astronomical Observatory, with which we will take our part in the common work of cultured nations to advance the sciences.”
At the opening of sessions in 1872, Sarmiento summarily refers to the intimate relationship between railways, telegraphs, bridges, roads, river communication, ports and lighthouses, agriculture and livestock, industry and mining, immigration, land distribution and public instruction: “ The word 'democracy' is a mockery, where the government that is based on it, postpones or neglects to train the moral and intelligent citizen."
And in his formal farewell in '74, he gives an account of the six-year term: “The progress of income has followed from year to year an equal proportion in its increase to that achieved by the education of the people, epistolary correspondence, immigration, the consumption of paper, which is the measure of intellectual movement, roads and telegraphy” and specifies the numbers: “From a thousand children in the National Schools in 1868 it increased to 4,000 in 1873;
In 1852 there were twenty schools funded by the State of Buenos Aires, and not even that number in the rest of the provinces;
Today there are 1,117 public schools;
In 1868 there was a Popular Library in San Juan, today there are 140 distributed in all the towns;
In 1868 communication with Europe was done by 4 monthly steamships, now it is done by 19;
Until 1868, 51,000 pesos were invested in books and in the last two years they amounted to 174,000 pesos per year.”
In addition, “the National College, its Chemistry Laboratory and the Physics Office, and the Academy of Exact Sciences in Córdoba have been built or are under construction.”
He concludes: “If there is an industry that should be encouraged by the government, it is that which reproduces, disseminates and popularizes the works of thought, the progress of science, or administrative data.”
Rereading Sarmiento's thesis that "to be educated is simply to be a free man" we can venture that the man from San Juan would have signed a paragraph attributed to Italo Calvino that is from the philosophy professor Gabriella Giudici: "A country that destroys the Public School never does so for money, because resources are lacking or their cost is excessive.
A country that dismantles Education, Arts or Cultures is already governed by those who only have something to lose with the dissemination of knowledge.”
Culture – a common but deserving idea – is an investment and not an expense.
The current educational cataclysm requires a complete revolution of the system at the level of the one led by Sarmiento at the time.
The “libertarian” sense seems to run in the opposite direction, as shown by his abrupt decision to reduce the Teacher Incentive Fund, as part of his battery of cuts to the provinces.
“I believe in freedom,” Don Domingo wrote to “Pepe” Posse.
A freedom that was nourished by democratic and “industrious” citizens, by scientific and technological innovation, by public education and the promotion of culture, and by an active State.
Only with these actors as protagonists, freedom – personal and social – advances.
Ricardo de Titto is a historian.