Creating Tropical Yankees

Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898-1908

Jose-Manuel Navarro

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415931168
• eBook ISBN: 9781317795070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This work explores how after acquiring Puerto Rico in 1898, the United States engaged in a systematic ideological conquest of the population through social science textbooks used in the public school system.

CHAPTER I

Education and Ideology in Puerto Rico, 1493–1898

INTRODUCTION AND GOALS OF THIS BOOK

This book analyzes the transformations of the structure, policies, and ideology of the Puerto Rican educational system wrought by American policy makers from 1898 to 1908, the first decade of American colonial control of that Caribbean nation. The major contribution of this book is its analysis of the U.S. effort to follow its military victory over Spain with a victory over the hearts and minds of the Island’s population through the public school system. The ideology that U.S. colonial officials sought to impose on the Island has not yet attracted the attention of students of the history, sociology, and politics of education in Puerto Rico and U.S.-Puerto Rico relations.

This book employs social science textbooks as the main objects of exegetical analysis. The works critiqued are the history and geography textbooks used in the public schools of Puerto Rico during the first decade of American colonial control of the Caribbean nation. I use social science textbooks to critique the ideology fostered among Puerto Rico’s public school children and elementary and secondary teachers for the following reasons:

1. History and geography textbooks present the distillation of the significant events of the past for the generations of the future through the eyes of an author with a particular ideological bent.

2. The textbooks impart the views of the past held by policy makers and educators of the present to the generations being schooled or educated now. Those views hail from specific class, religious, gender, economic, cultural, racial, social, and political perspectives.

3. The social science textbooks used in a school system reflect the consensus of the policy makers and authors—a shared agreement, stated or unstated—defining and circumscribing the historical and cultural legacy for the people now living and the students being educated now. Consequently, textbooks are today’s definition of the past. Textbooks usually legitimate what we have around us now—the reigning socio-economic, religious, political, cultural, and historical order—with the unquestionable authority of a canon bequeathing permanent, immutable, irrefragable truths.

4. In daily functional practice, textbooks are perceived as unimpeachable sources containing unassailable truths, secular oracles speaking about the past to the teachers and students of today. Also, they are distillations, albeit filtered ones, of primary materials and sources from the moment of their writing to the moment of their publication.

5. Social science textbooks are the arbiters and gatekeepers of what the correct, cherishable past is for the generation of students studying history today.

6. What is left out of a textbook is, by implication, less valuable, probably insignificant, and officially non-existent.

The concerns that underlie my analysis are similar to those expressed by several Native American historians who critiqued the textbooks used in the California public schools during 1964–1969. They were protesting the stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans and the exclusion of any positive Native American contribution to the world in the textbooks then in use.

Writing for the members of the American Indian Historical Association, Jeannette Henry, its secretary, emphasized to the governmental and educational policy makers of California the importance of textbooks. In spite of the many “multi-media technological devices available,” she underscored, the textbook, whether in elementary and secondary schools or colleges and universities, “is the time-honored bulwark of the learning process,” holding an authoritative position.” She added that textbooks “influence a student by bending him spiritually and mentally in a definite ideological direction.”¹

In Puerto Rico during the decade 1898–1908, there were no other “multi-media technological devices” available to students, other than textbooks. Textbooks did, in fact, bend students “spiritually and mentally in a definite ideological direction.” The purpose of this book is to chart and critique that “definite ideological direction” in Puerto Rico from 1898 to 1908.

This book builds upon the path breaking work of previous students of Education in Puerto Rico. Foremost among these are Juan José Osuna and Aida Negrón de Montilla.

Juan José Osuna wrote the first complete history of Education in Puerto Rico.² Osuna covers the development of education in Puerto Rico from the first orders issued by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1503 requiring the children in each village to “get together twice a day in a house next to the church in order that the chaplain might teach them to read and write, to make the sign of the cross, and to learn the prayers of the church,”³ through the development of education up to 1945. He explores teacher training, politics of education, the growth of elementary, secondary, vocational, and university education, and administration and supervision under Spain and the United States. He also has a separate section on the policy regarding the language of instruction in the classrooms after the US invasion, from 1898 through 1945.

However, Osuna does not analyze in detail the ideological content of the textbooks used under Spain and the United States. Also, he does not explore in detail the significance of the manual and industrial training movement, nor the socio-political significance of the sending of Puerto Rican students to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, the Tuskegee Normal and Agricultural Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Aida Negrón de Montilla analyzes the Americanization process in the schools of Puerto Rico from 1900 to 1930.⁴ She studies the circular letters issued by commissioners of education in Puerto Rico to show how the process of Americanization, the adoption of American ideals and views, was inculcated into students of the public schools of Puerto Rico during the first three decades of American colonial control. Like Osuna, she does not analyze the historico-political significance of the manual and industrial training movement nor the socio-political significance of the actions of the policy makers in having a select number of students pursue studies in Hampton, Tuskegee and Carlisle. Further, just as Osuna, she does not analyze the ideology of the textbooks used by teachers under Spain and under the United States.

Reference needs to be made to another student of US-Puerto Rico relations from 1898 to 1900. Edward J. Berbusse dedicates one chapter of his work to the US role in education from 1898 to 1900.⁵ Berbusse’s short incursion into the analysis of education in Puerto Rico during the two years of the military regime does not allow him space to explore the critical role of textbooks in the American enterprise of assuring ideological and political hegemony over the newly subjugated colonial people nor the role of Hampton, Tuskegee, and Carlisle in the history of education in Puerto Rico.

Similarly, Carmen Gómez and David Cruz, two other writers on the history of education in Puerto Rico, ignore the significance of Hampton, Tuskegee, and Carlisle. Their essay is a review of “educational achievements” of the past, having as a “fundamental objective” to “inspire and stimulate Puerto Rican teachers to develop in their daily labors with the extraordinary example of good teachers of the past.”^{6, 7}

Thus, none of these works has attempted to trace the origins of educational policy to its roots in domestic United States experiments. None, therefore, is able to distinguish what was innovative or new from what United States officials had in mind as they stepped ashore. Thus, none is able to present a clear analysis of the evolution of educational policy under American tutelage during the first ten years of American colonial control of Puerto Rico.

In contrast, this book links the experiences carried out at Hampton, Tuskegee, and Carlisle to policies put into effect in Puerto Rico. Those experiences, I argue, formed the backdrop for US practice in dealing with people considered backward or inferior.

In addition, this book looks closely at how these lessons in Americanization and the consolidation of imperialist ideological hegemony were implemented at the formative level of education through textbooks. Textbooks were the unquestioned sources of reference, the presenters of the universal reality, the founts of knowledge used daily by teachers and students in the public schools of Puerto Rico.

My purpose is to present an exegesis of the textbooks and examine how they propagated the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant Male weltanschauung, while inculcating a belief in the superiority of American culture and the inferiority of all other cultures in the contemporary world of 1898–1908 among the students and teachers of Puerto Rico’s public schools. Also, my linking of Puerto Rico to the Hampton-Tuskegee-Carlisle model seeks to emphasize that educational policy makers saw African Americans, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans as similarly inferior, limited in their intellectual capacities and destined to manual or “industrial” occupations at or near the bottom of society.

United States commissioners of Indian Affairs and governmental and educational policy makers did not believe that Native Americans had a history. Puerto Ricans, on the other hand, were considered more “civilized” than the Native Americans because they had a history under Spain. As a consequence, Puerto Ricans were viewed as more educable than the Native Americans. However, the ideology of the textbooks assured that Puerto Ricans learned the same lessons on the superiority of WASPM culture and the concomitant inferiority of Native American, African American, Puerto Rican, and other non-US world cultures of the time that were being taught to Native Americans at Carlisle and African Americans at Hampton and Tuskegee.

HISTORY OF EDUCATION IN PUERTO RICO, 1493–1898

To provide a historical framework, I now present a brief history of education in Puerto Rico under the Spanish colonial regime, lasting from 1493 to 1898.

The first educational attempts in Puerto Rico were made by the Catholic Church, which sought to Christianize the Taíno Indians who inhabited what was then the island of Boriquén. Although teaching was primarily religious, the priests sought to teach the Indians the Spanish language as well. In 1512, a cathedral school, an institution of learning at a secondary school level, was established in San Juan. This was the first educational institution in Puerto Rico. In 1513, royal orders mandated the construction of a separate building for religious worship and instruction on all farms. Every owner of forty or more Indians was ordered to teach one of them reading, writing and catechism.⁸

For the next two centuries, up to the beginning of the eighteenth, education continued to be a function of the Roman Catholic Church. As settlements and towns grew throughout the Island, the Church taught laity and candidates for the clergy. While the monasteries served as schools for men preparing for the priesthood, the parish church served as the educational institution for the children. In the parish church, children learned the catechism, their prayers, and reading and writing.⁹

During the eighteenth century, administrative and colonial services improved as a result of Alejandro O’Reilly’s 1765 report to the king on the social conditions of the Island. In 1770, the Island was divided into 22 districts (partidos). Each district had a teacher, paid by the governmental authorities, responsible for teaching catechism, reading, writing, and ciphering. All parents had to send at least half of their children to school or face sanctions. Children, regardless of race, had to be accommodated. Unfortunately, there is “no evidence” in the historical record about the “functioning of these schools” throughout the Island, “except in San Juan.”

The 1770 movement to found a university in Puerto Rico failed and Puerto Ricans continued pursuing university studie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedicatoria
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter I Education and Ideology in Puerto Rico, 1493–1898
• Chapter II The Ideology of U.S. Policy Makers
• Chapter III The Hampton-Tuskegee-Carlisle Model of Education
• Chapter IV History and Geography Textbooks Used in the Public Schools, 1898–1908
• Chapter V Two Historiographical Giants: John Bach McMaster and Salvador Brau
• Chapter VI Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index