V. Education
Hacienda cattle brand
In bygone days—two hundred years ago—an hacienda church or chapel bell signaled school. A youngster or priest or acolyte yanked the bell rope. In the tropics, if you were lucky, you put on your shirgo (raincoat), and got to school dry. Your class started at 7:00 A.M. and lasted until noon, when the heat moved in. You walked to your home for lunch or picked it off the trees as you went home. If school convened regularly you were fortunate. You were fortunate if classes freed you from hacienda chores.
In the temperate zone, school began about 9:00 A.M. and reconvened after the siesta—closing at 4:00 P.M. Again intermittency played havoc with the sessions. The maestro (teacher) was very informal; if you had a teacher who was dedicated, your education began to acquire meaning.
Teaching was in Spanish, though the pupils might speak one or more of the sixty dialects. For centuries the parents objected to Spanish being taught; at home the children spoke their native tongue. Since Spanish coercion was continual, it was only normal for the students to rebel. Intuitively, they sensed the destruction of their way of life. Both school and church were suspect.
Priests, as instructors, read selections from the Bible, religious treatises, and pamphlets. There were no books for the students. With pencil, paper, and blackboard or slate, children learned the rudiments of writing, reading, and arithmetic. Without musical accompaniment, they learned hymns and poetry. Their centuries were centuries of neglect.
It was exceptional when an hacienda hired a priest-instructor permanently. Since teachers were either poorly paid or were hacienda guests, they offered halfhearted service. Haciendas were known to neglect education intentionally: the peasant was to be kept subordinate—a little reading, a little writing, but no more.
Usually the main hacienda residence housed the school. One of the twenty or thirty rooms was designated the classroom. It was small and had few or no windows; the open door let in light and air. Students in the sixteenth century sat on the floor. Later, they had benches and sat around a table, the maestro at one end. Slates came into being in the eighteenth century; and, in the nineteenth century, blackboards. Engravings of the presidents began to decorate bare walls. Dirty, foxed maps hid stains. Tiled floors were often cold and damp. Though there was sunshine most of the year, classes were never held under the laurel or palm trees.
Girls sat on one side, boys on the other—if the room was large enough. There were no sanitary facilities, no health precautions, no hygiene instruction. At recess, the children drank from the patio fountain or cattle trough.
On an hacienda employing four hundred workers, about twenty children attended school. Since the hacienda was on a dawn-to-dark schedule, work never ran out; the average hacendado felt he could employ those skinny legs and arms to his advantage. At harvest time there were no classes; during fiestas there were no classes; if the maestro got drunk there were no classes. Truancy was a fact of life.
At school and at home the children played marbles, using clay marbles of their own baking. They spun tops and played jacks, tag, hide-and-seek, and a flower game called "Stealing a Soul." In "The Old Saints," the "buyer" dashed from one saint to another to see if his saint is the one he wants to buy. If the saint runs off and is caught he is given a "job" to do.
A favorite song was "Golden Bell":
Little golden bell,
Let me pass;
With all my children
Who are behind me.
Singing "La Víbora del Mar," the children divided into two groups; this was a tug-of-war song and is still remembered:
The serpent,
serpent of the sea,
here it can pass by.
Those in front run fast,
those in back will be left
behind;
a Mexican girl, selling fruit,
plums, apricots, muskmelons,
and watermelons.
Haciendas had no school libraries. The casa principal may have acquired a collection of history, travel, philosophy, and fiction; but such collections were rarely shared. For centuries the Inquisition influenced most reading habits. Pagan and Catholic superstition wreaked havoc with young minds; it is still evident in rural Mexico where men and women knock on the side of a coffin—and listen for an answer. Men and women flagellate themselves. Tarahumaras, in caves of the Barranca del Cobre country, worship stone idols and pray to rain gods. Lacandones still leave offerings on jungle altars.
Until about 1826, when a national school system was created in the larger towns and in the cities, textbooks were unknown except at private schools. Homer, Sappho, Plato, Shakespeare and Kant were all but unrecognized. Don Quixote, however, was an influence. So were Lope de Vega and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. But they were only literary shadows. No hacienda maestro explored the thoughts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, or Jefferson. There were no science labs. There was no art instruction.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only six or eight Mexican minds contributed to culture and learning: Ruiz de Alarcón, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Don Bartolomé de Alba were among them. Their influence was restricted to metropolitan centers. Without books, with limited transportation, the hacienda remained a lost society.
In 1910, when there were approximately eight thousand haciendas, between ten and twenty students attended school each day on a given hacienda: In all, some 870,000 children and teenagers were enrolled—gaining a rudimentary education. In towns and cities, where private schools contributed to the nation's education, schools were small and offered limited opportunities. With a population in 1910 of 15 million, Mexico's enrollment was among the world's lowest. Mexico had only 3 million literates. In all hacienda areas millions could not read or write—or speak Spanish.
During the more than ten years of civil war and machete madness that followed 1910-1914, education of the masses was disrupted throughout the nation. School attendance dropped in towns and cities; on the hacienda every hint of learning stopped. When hacienda after hacienda was pillaged or burned, the skeletal school system disappeared. Books—those there were—went up in flames. Youth had no chance for scholastic growth. The young who survived were fortunate. During these years, Mexico's population declined by one million people.
Years of revolution retarded Mexico to an incalculable degree as guns took the place of brains. Towns, while occupied by troops or harassed by gunfire, had to abandon teaching and schooling. Youngsters born on an hacienda during those years grew up without seeing the inside of a school.
Yet, it is an amazing and stimulating fact that Mexico, after such havoc, could evolve an educational system of merit and induce the young and the old to attend classes. The "Each One, Teach One," or "Analfabetismo Program," was put into effect and successfully carried out. In 1951, thirty-seven years after the haciendas had been abolished, the government appropriated 355,680,000 pesos for schools. Prefabs sprang up overnight; old buildings were renovated; education became compulsory; efforts were made to attract teachers and to train them.
The wealthy elite sons and daughters of the hacienda studied at institutions of higher learning abroad. This favored group, though small, contributed to the nation's maturity. Universities such as Salamanca, Heidelberg, Harvard, the Sorbonne, Oxford, and Cambridge enriched these students. They assumed important posts, government positions, and engineering jobs; they became senators, doctors, lawyers, and educators. The long, bitter struggle to attain a middle class had begun.