Simón Rodríguez and the Republican education: the relationships between the south of Colombia – Túquerres and the north of Ecuador - Latacunga

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the relationship between Túquerres and Latacunga from the action and theory deployed by Simón Rodríguez in both places during the construction of the Republic. Throughout the text, the importance assigned by Simón Rodríguez to the conformation of the Republic is shown; the main components of republican education and its implementation methodology are analyzed, and finally, the relations of this vast region regarding the education system required today are addressed.

Few educational projects have emphasized the profound link between education and democratic and social life as much as that of Simón Rodríguez; hence, understanding this model requires a prior examination of his conception of American society, which, in his opinion, was marked not only by acute national conflicts but, above all, by those of a social nature and therefore, divided by a new genre of dominators and dominated people. On these and other categories, Simón Rodríguez organizes his plan of a 'republican and social education', as he himself calls it, of which he had been speaking and writing publicly and privately for more than twenty-four years, based on a strong criticism and rupture with traditional or testamentary education and bringing at the same time a clear alternative character to the project. It is in the denunciation of an inherited and current past, as well as in the announcement of a future to be built, that he constitutes the plan of a 'republican and social education', making both phases of the project converging into two sides of the same coin.