18Th Century) the Peripheral Example of Grand Canary Island of the Fraud of the Enlightenment for Popular Education

Vol.8, number 18 May - August 2003 THEMATIC RESEARCH pp. 479-502 Teaching in Spain during the Ancient Regime (18th century) The Peripheral Example of Grand Canary Island of the Fraud of the Enlightenment for Popular Education ∗ MANUEL FERRAZ LORENZO Abstract: This paper is the heuristic result of analyzing and interpreting the difficulties of the Canarian peripheral society during the 18th century. Attention is centered especially on the educational proposals that favored the instruction and culture of the Enlightenment. We have proven how the established educational guidelines had little to do with that widely expressed idea of public happiness. Nor did those guidelines become—or even attempt to become—a mechanism of social weakening of the system of absolutism and its network of privileges; instead, they served as an anchor for the emerging political scheme and the new standards and values of the end of the 1700s. From the time of the creation and protection of schools by the Real Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País de Gran Canaria (“Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country of Grand Canary”), the ideological thrust was more propitious for spreading the despotic royal policy of the moment to all social sectors. The Canary Islands, and in particular Grand Canary, considered “adjacent islands”, became an example of weak, ephemeral, and especially unsuccessful eighteenth-century reformism, in terms of the education the people were to receive. Key words: 18th century, Canary Islands, popular education, Economic Societies, fraud. [...] No one is unaware that just as the glory, the prosperity and the duration of States depend on the customs of the Nations that comprise them, the happiness and health of Peoples consist of the care in educating youth, and even the infancy of their individuals [...] Everyone complains of the poor education given to the tender shoots. All know that in the current plan of education there is a multitude of vices that grow with age, and whose effects become evident over time in the Courts, the Classrooms, the handling of businesses and in all trade of civil and political life. Thus, without pausing on these two points, I shall externalize my reflections as they occur [...] (Joseph Clavijo y Fajardo, “El Pensador”, 1763). The sciences, the amiable sciences, which in Europe have raised this Century above all the most enlightened centuries of Greek and Roman antiquity, are still foreign to the Fortunatae Insulae. V.S. is the Government of ∗ Head Professor of Theory and History of Education, Centro Superior de Educación, Edificio Central, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife. C/ Molinos de Agua, Urb. La Quinta, Edif. 1, Pa 5, 2C, 38207 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain. E-MAIL: [email protected] a Country that still lives in the ill-fated 10th and 11th centuries, without having to do so. From their first notions, the letters offer V.S. a quite melancholic and humiliating sight. Who knows how to write correctly? The officials of the pen themselves, the teachers themselves (I tremble to say), the graduates and professional literate are absolutely unaware of the most trivial elements of Castilian orthography, and being so, who will teach us to write well? (Joseph Viera y Clavijo, “El Síndico Personero”, 1764). Although the 17th century in Spain has been described in generalized form as “decadent” and “unfortunate”—fundamentally because of its failures in political, military and financial matters—the 18th century has been characterized as a century of “reforms” and “prosperity” in practically all spheres (including of course the cultural sphere) in the wake of the reign of Charles III. Although it seems evident that objective reasons for these expressions are not lacking (given that factors of a varied nature, difficult to see on some occasions and imprecise to delimit on others, have interlaced to place this virtual dividing line between two supposedly opposite perceptions), it is no less certain that the object of study, the dynamics of events and the social phenomena and processes that have occurred, have remained imperturbable through what we could call the normalizing/absolutist quietism that, in a strict sense, spread over both centuries. A situation that, as we all know, would be shaken only timidly and at very concrete moments by the pressure of the nascent industrial, and especially commercial bourgeoisie, in almost permanent connivance with the rest of the sectors of the landholding oligarchy, which was already foretelling the fracture of the pre-Enlightenment monarchy and the emergence of a proto-liberal State.1 This initial warning, which attempts to prevent Manichaean simplifications in the prolific historical dialectic we are trying to develop, also aids us in situating the coordinates on which we shall center this article, temporarily constricted to the period of glory and enlightened optimism of the royal reforms that propelled the creation of the Reales Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País (RSEAP)(“Royal Economic Societies of Friends of the Country”). In spite of the general introductory caution set forth—which has no interest other than to install the thematic and methodological framework on which we shall move—our purpose is much more modest. The present article will be dedicated to the study of one of these societies, concretely the society established in Las Palmas, Grand Canary Island, in order to add to the mosaic of the Canary Islands we began at another time with the analysis of the economic society of Tenerife.2 The most unique aspects of this society, and above all, its educational profiles, will become our center of attention; first, however, we must make a timely reference to the insular precedents of this formative, instructive and indoctrinating subject. Antecedents of Education on Grand Canary Island On islands where the dominant social tasks were performed by farmer workers, laborers, artisans and servants, in addition to employees under military jurisdiction,3 the learning of reading and writing must not have been very common or apparently very useful. The island of Canaria, the name given in ancient times to Grand Canary Island, was a clear example of this almost generalized lack of concern for activities related to subjects’ education, instruction or simply learning, just as in all societies during the long duration of the Ancient Regime of absolutism.4 Only the work of the religious orders mitigated, in part, the effects of cerebral famine, with the pernicious consequences of subservience and falsity caused by such work, due to its understanding of education as the purification of corrupt, besieged souls in weak, perishable bodies profoundly subject to the emergent passions of evil.5 Without going back too far in time, to avoid crossing over our established chronological margins, we could affirm that one of the first schools created in the city of Las Palmas with certain systematicness and rigor was founded by the Society of Jesus. The inquisitor and canon of the cathedral church, Andrés Romero y Suárez, in a public document dated May 15, 1696 and others that followed,6 offered a lifetime annuity of 200, a hacienda of 600 acres with figs trees included, in Jinámar, and the houses on the property under the condition that the Jesuits use them to teach the natives literacy. And so it happened, because on January 1 of the following year, and “with the founder’s inexpressible pleasure”, as Viera y Clavijo comments, classes were opened in grammar and literacy. This school continued until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, although it was necessary to wait two years for the Council of Castile to emit a royal edict for the founding of two free grammar schools (also called royal schools, and somewhat later, public schools) in the city’s Vegueta and Triana barrios. According to the documentation consulted, they were under the supervision of the regent of the Audiencia and had been granted the funds from the old bequest of the inquisitor, Romero Suárez, in addition to forty pesos for leasing the building and five reales per month from the most prosperous parents “to compensate the laborious work of teaching and due to the increased prices of all basic items.”7 It seems, although perhaps an over assumption, that while the teacher at Vegueta remained loyal to the scholastic ideas of the moment, the teacher at Triana adapted to the emerging pre- Enlightenment current, and proposed the use of certain Jansenistic beliefs in his school as a basis for improving education.8 Of any means, let us not deceive ourselves: in addition to faulty learning in reading and writing in both schools, as correctly pointed out by A. Millares Torres, educational techniques and methodologies were quite deficient in these two centers of capital city learning, according to the eloquent testimony presented by Domingo José Navarro, who expressed, powerless and disillusioned, that “school hours were an inferno of whimpers, clamor and cries.”9 In the rest of the Island, things were still much worse in terms of the difficulties encountered in creating and consolidating any type of teaching establishment. In fact, the only town that had even a minimally equipped school was Telde. It was opened as a foundation in 1737 by Pedro Manrique Alvarado with funding from Diego López Montañer; to begin functioning, the teacher was provided with a house that had a hall for teaching, and 160 pesos per year earned from various pieces of property: According to said foundation, [the teacher] is obligated to teach during the

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