Role
Sunday, September 10, 2006
The Role of Women in Education
I would like to start with a brief summary about Manuel Belgrano's ideas on education in general and women's education in particular. He had studied Law in Spain and there, he became familiiar with the new theories on education.
These theories had been developed by Frederick Froebel and Johann Pestalozzi, they encouraged the creation of an educational environment that involved practical work and the direct use of materials. These thinkers favoured spontaneous work and self-activity. They said that children should not be given ready-made answers but should arrive at answers themselves. The method was to proceed from the easier to the more difficult (observation-consciousness-speech-measuring-drawing-writing-numbers). The theories favoured the observation of nature in contrast with the popular belief at that moment.
Belgrano, convinced of these ideas, wanted to put them into practice in our country, but he found a great opposition among people in Government. He was in favour of free schools as a means to eradicate ignorance and misery, he wanted to create agricultural schools to teach country people how to better work the soil.
Belgrano was among the first who gave importance to women's education thinking in the role women had at home teaching children. He said that "an ignorant woman raise unable, retarded citizens". He wanted to change the educational system because, he thought, it destroyed children's imagination. He wanted education to be compulsory, with new methodology applied. He also stated that the world was full of books with important and interesting discoveries about agriculture and life in general, but those books did not reach the country people.
Belgrano had the ideas but he did not have the power or the money to make them possible. Around fifty year later, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who was in favour of the same ideas, and who had the power to put them into practice when he was...
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