Education: How Old The NewWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Education: How Old The New
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Education -- History
Professor Edward Gaylord Bourne, professor of history at Yale
University, wrote the volume on Spain in America which constitutes the
third volume of "The American Nation," a history of this country in
twenty-seven volumes edited by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, who
holds the chair of history at Harvard University. Professor Bourne has
no illusions with regard to the relative value of Anglo-Saxon and
Spanish education in this country. In his chapter on "The Transmission
of European Culture" he says: "Early in the eighteenth century the
Lima University (Lima, Peru) counted nearly two thousand students and
numbered about one hundred and eighty doctors (in its faculty) in
theology, civil and canon law, medicine and the arts." Ulloa {303}
reports that "the university makes a stately appearance from without
and its inside is decorated with suitable ornaments." There were
chairs of all the sciences and "some of the professors have,
notwithstanding the vast distance, gained the applause of the literati
of Europe." "The coming of the Jesuits contributed much to the real
educational work in America. They established colleges, one of which,
the little Jesuit college at Juli, on Lake Titicaca, became a seat of
genuine learning." (Bourne.)
He does not hesitate to emphasize the contrast between Spanish America
and English America with regard to education and culture, and the most
interesting feature of his comparison is that Spanish America
surpassed the North completely and anticipated by nearly two centuries
some of the progress that we are so proud of in the nineteenth
century. What a startling paragraph, for instance, is the following
for those who have been accustomed to make little of the Church's
interest in education and to attribute the backwardness of South
America, as they presumed they knew it, to the presence of the Church
and her influence there.
"Not all the institutions of learning founded in Mexico in the
sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to
say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by
the officers they surpassed anything existing in English America
until the nineteenth {304} century. Mexican scholars made
distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly
medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and
anthropology. Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and
histories of the Mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their
scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are
Toribio de Motolinia's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,'
Duran's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,' but most important
of all Sahagun's great work on Mexican life and religion."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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