THE RELEVANCE OF HOSTOS’S IDEAS ON EDUCATION

Carlos Rojas Osorio
Professor of Philosophy, University of Puerto Rico at Humacao

Education as the practice of freedom maintains its validity. Hostos writes: “Rousseau is among those who have understood best that one of the primary purposes of education should be to teach how to be free.” As we know, Paulo Freire developed and extended the idea of education as the practice of freedom.

The idea is that education follows the evolution of the psychological development of children and that it should adapt to it. Today this is a truism, but during Hostos’s times knowledge about child psychology had not been well established. During the 20th century, this branch of psychology grew tremendously, as shown by the works of Piaget, Vigotsky and others. But Hostos had the right intuition, which has been confirmed by psychology and by the science of education. “Reason functions by always using its previous activity.”

The guiding ideas on critical thinking are expressed very clearly in Hostos’s work. Hostos writes that education is not about teaching an image of the world, but rather about the learner seeing the world by him or herself. To attain this, it is necessary not so much to teach knowledge as “to learn how to acquire it; it is not enough to offer science as a finished product; it is necessary to teach how to construct it.” Education should not seek to direct understanding, but it should “allow the learner to be the perceiver.”

The critique of education that instills conformity and uniformity is also found in Hostos. “The horrible gymnastics of memorization has deformed and impeded understanding for so many generations in the world.” It should be noted that the great reformers of education have always fought against the same evils: mechanization, routinization, indoctrination. Luis Vives, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Montaigne and Rabelais during the Renaissance; Rousseau and Pestalozzi during the 18th century; Hostos in Santo Domingo and Paulo Freire in Latin America were critics of existing systems for falling into the same shortcomings and routines. For example, Hostos depicts Erasmus as: “The funniest satirist of the scholastic foolishness and ridiculous practices and one of the most vigorous and determined precursors of the religious reform.” Hostos praises Montaigne when he states: “His judgment as a sharp knower of the true object of human education is encompassing in his exact appreciation that knowledge is the instrument and not the object of education.” In Rousseau’s work, Hostos praises the idea of “leaving the most initiative possible to the learners. Children’s reasoning should be free, so that it pursues truth in itself.”

Hostos’s principle, “The touchstone of all teaching is the interest it arouses,” is still valid. That is to say, nothing is more important than motivation in the learning process.

There are other important ideas, for example, in the area of education for democracy. I think that is a point that Hostos emphasizes, and it is necessary to integrate into our evaluation what he says about democracy, with its limitations, as well as the importance of education in a truly democratic process.

In Tratado de moral, for example, in “Moral social,” he insists that having rights implies the obligation to become educated. Hostos says that the best way to defend our rights is to become educated. So there are obligations that correspond to rights. And those corresponding obligations require becoming educated at each different level. The other point that I had already made at our last gathering is the need to update pedagogy from a scientific perspective, in keeping with Hostos’s spirit. And Hostos’s pedagogy was scientific as it fought against the religious excesses that he saw as detrimental to Latin America. And therefore, those were irrational scientific instruments. But obviously pedagogical science is a science of continuous movement, and we cannot remain fixated on the pedagogy that existed during Hostos’s times, but rather follow its progress to its current status. In general, then, I agree with the proposal that we should make a new synthesis in which Hostos’s important ideas are critically assumed, as José Miguel [Rodríguez Matos] mentioned, in light of our knowledge, of the current evaluations and of the transformation of our society.

WORKS CITED

Hostos, Eugenio María de. Ciencia de la pedagogía. Nociones e historia. Vol. VI, Tomo I, Educación. Obras completas. Edición crítica. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña y Editorial de Puerto Rico, 1991.

-----. Ensayos didácticos. Vol. II, Tomo XIX, Obras completas. San Juan, Editorial Coquí, 1969.

-----. Forjando el porvenir americano. Vol. I, Tomo XIII, Ibid.

-----. Mi viaje al sur. Tomo VI, Ibid.