THE RELEVANCE OF HOSTOS’S IDEAS ON EDUCATION

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

In 2001 two forums were held in Puerto Rico to discuss the relevance of Eugenio María de Hostos’s pedagogy and educational philosophy, at which several important Hostos scholars congregated.1 A debate had been brewing for several years about the role that Hostos’s ideas could and should play in the island’s educational programs, and two viewpoints emerged. There was a longstanding perception held by many Puerto Rican intellectuals that the country’s educational system had failed to incorporate Hostos’s contributions to that field. Conversely, a different point of view considered Hostos’s ideas as a 19th century corpus that has been surpassed by contemporary pedagogical science.

Hostos’s ideas about education were grounded in the rational and empirical out- look that became the trademark of positivist thinking. They were influenced by Karl Kraus’s philosophy, by Darwin’s theories about evolution, and by the development of the emerging social sciences. His work borrowed critically from August Comte and Herbert Spencer, among his contemporaries.2 But as Prof. Carlos Rojas argues in his article, Hostos ideas about education have to be understood as part of the libertarian tradition that ushered in our contemporary critical perspective.

Hostos became a teacher out of necessity in 1877 in Venezuela, where he also proposed the creation of an “objective school” using the new scientific methodology. He believed in using science and empirical observation as the basis for instruction. Although he could not put his ideas to a test in Venezuela, shortly thereafter Hostos was invited by President Gregorio Luperón in 1879 to develop the educational system in the Dominican Republic. There he established the escuelas normales or teachers schools, for men and, jointly with Dominican writer Salomé Ureña, for women. In 1873, during his first stay in Chile, he had argued in favor of giving women access to scientific education. In Santo Domingo he also founded night schools for workers, all of which attests to his inclusiveness on issues of gender and class. Hostos was forced to leave that country in 1889, after Ulises Hereaux (Lilís) became dictator.

During the 1890s Hostos went back to Chile. This time President José Manuel Balmaceda invited him to be part of that country’s educational reform, and he became the director of the Liceo Manuel Luis Amunátegui, in Santiago. In 1898, he returned to New York and Puerto Rico, where he organized the League of Patriots, a citizens’s educational and civic movement, in response to the United States takeover of the island. In 1899 Hostos founded, in the city of Mayagüez, the Municipal Institute, which included a school of agriculture and short-lived municipal school. There the teaching of natural sciences incorporated field tours and the teaching of math included manipulatives.

Hostos would return to Santo Domingo once more when Heraux was assassinated and the new president, Horacio Vázquez, invited him to take charge of education in his government, which Hostos did until his death in 1904. During this last stay, Hostos founded vocational schools and started coed educational institution. He also devoted energy and thinking to the creation of la Liga de Ciudadanos, a non-partisan organization that promoted civic education and citizen’s participation in public affairs. John Dewey would propose and develop a similar idea a few years later in the United States. Towards the end of his life, Hostos explored how learning could take place outside traditional institutional frameworks. This is what we now know as adult education or “education without walls.” Moreover, Hostos wrote about the need to strengthen democracy by articulating el poder social or social power, a concept that is similar to what we now call “the civil society”, after Gramsci.

This presentation by Dr. Carlos Rojas Osorio in the second forum, which I have translated into English, is a brief but poignant statement on Hostos’s pioneer thinking about education and its relevance from a contemporary perspective. His ideas about education build on the legacy of Rousseau, Pestalozzi and others, as he anticipates Dewey’s and Paulo Freire’s contributions.

Orlando José Hernández
Humanities

ENDNOTES TO TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

1. These forums were cosponsored by the University of Puerto Rico’s Institute for Hostosian Studies and the University of Puerto Rico in Cayey. They took place at the UPR campus in Cayey on August 8, and at the University Carlos Albizu in San Juan on October 5. Rafael Aragunde and Vivian Quiles-Calderín, Eugenio María de Hostos: Un debate intelectual en torno a sus ideas pedagógicas. Instituto de Estudios Hostosianos; Oficina de la Rectora, Recinto de Río Piedras; Universidad de Puerto Rico en Cayey; and Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, [San Juan,] 2002.

2 . For a discussion of Hostos’s life and pedagogical ideas see the entry by Ángel Villarini Jusino and Carlos A. Torre, “Eugenio María de Hostos, in Joy A. Palmer, editor, fifty Major Thinkers on Education. From Confucius to Dewey. Rutledge, London and New York, 2001, 146-154.