Antonio Espinoza's book on the growth of primary schools in republican Lima is a great addition to the literature on the history of education in Latin America. By fully embracing a broad sociological and political understanding of the multiplicity of actors and dimensions involved in the establishment of an education system, Espinoza provides a clear, ambitious and effective research agenda that could be used for other regions and periods. Aside from the impressively wide array of archival sources Espinoza works with to present a multi-sited scenario, his use of the historiography of education and the early republican period is a great resource for future researchers. His creative and convincing interpretations of such material provide evidence for his complex understanding of the period and for his sense of the social, political and intellectual dynamics that lie not just in the formulation of education policies but also in the everyday life of schools, administrative offices and classrooms that in the end shaped the lived experience of the state and schooling in the different facets of the first century of republican Peru.
The guiding idea organising the book is the understanding of primary schooling as a key component in the parallel processes of state formation and nation building that bring with them a complex set of tensions: between local elites’ interests of preserving social hierarchies based on patrimonialism, racial and economic privilege, and rhetorical allegiance to republican ideas; between local and regional agendas and the state's need for centralised control of resources and policies; between different groups’ demands for the expansion of schooling as a vehicle for social inclusion, and the disputes over the nature of schooling among the elites. Liberal ideas that circulated in Lima saw education and schooling as key for the construction of civil society and citizenship. But Espinoza demonstrates how, as also happened in other Latin American countries – both in discourse and practice – while acknowledging the need for schooling, conservatives gained ground by guaranteeing that authoritarian rule and segregating practices thwarted the democratic promise of schooling by devising different types of education that derived from their own understanding of hierarchical divisions among the population (i.e. the need to educate the indigenous populations not to grant them citizenship, but to train them as peasants and soldiers).
In the first chapter Espinoza studies the patterns in the growth of the education system in Lima and its provinces, paying attention to the tension between the demand for the service from different social sectors and the state's intervention as a response to it. His periodisation derives from the relationship between three variables: the number of private and state-funded schools and enrolment in them, and registration per school-age population. This chapter sets the scene for the century under examination. It places the middle classes as the main drive in the initial growth of primary schooling, as the demand for the service grew among rural and poor urban populations, when the state started taking a larger role in the expansion of and support for the system. This is followed by Chapter 2, offering a dynamic depiction of the ideological tensions at play between western ideas about education, as they were filtered or affected by local political agendas and differences between nationalism and republicanism – particularly in the decades after the defeat in the war with Chile in 1879, when nationalism became a predominant discourse in the curriculum. Although the chapter presents ideas about education, it also provides a glimpse into the fragility of the elites’ allegiance to clear-cut western political thinking of the time as they negotiated their political interests and perceptions of social hierarchies. Chapter 3 steps away from pedagogy or the specificities of the provision of the service, to focus on the dynamics between national and local governance of the schools: this presents the emerging primary school system as embedded in broader social processes together with the specific actors involved in shaping and running the system.
In Chapter 4, Espinoza aims at entering the schools and classrooms to examine the school culture through the tensions between the formal curriculum and what is taught and lived within the schools. In line with his periodisation, he closely links the political dynamics operating in each period to what goes on within the schools. Despite his remarkable effort using diverse sources, the fascinating detail (e.g. the discussion about physical punishment), and the great insights into the continuities of colonial culture and slow renewal of practices and ideas, this is perhaps the least satisfying chapter mostly because of the gap between what is attempted and what can be achieved, given the nature of the sources.
The final chapter focuses on the last moment of Espinoza's periodisation, in the early twentieth century. It analyses the transition from local council-run schools to a centralised education system as a process led by the Civilista party, fostering a nationalist agenda. An important social and political outcome of this process was the beginning of the professionalisation of teaching and the liberation (separation?) of teachers from the control that local communities had over them. In this chapter, Espinoza also outlines some of the great difficulties that are still challenging the Peruvian state: on the one hand, funding teachers’ salaries, reaching remote rural populations with the service, and guaranteeing that the quality of education serves its democratic promise as it expands; on the other hand, the fact that a centralised management of the education system does not necessarily override local elites and their active agency to control state resources to maintain their power and hierarchical and racist social order.
Espinoza's numerous claims of originality throughout the book are perhaps unnecessary and intrusive. His project is ambitious, well executed, and it constitutes an outstanding and path-breaking contribution to the understanding of republican Peru, and Lima as a region.
