Carlos Newland

The Estado Docente and its Expansion: Spanish American Elementary Education, 1900–1950

Among the most outstanding changes that occurred in Spanish America during the first half of the twentieth century is the transformation in the area of education. Two salient features deserve emphasis. First, this change was quantitative: many more children came to attend school, and a greater proportion of the inhabitants became literate.1 Second, this increase in schooling came about within a homogeneous institutional framework. It was the Estado Docente -personified in national and provincial governments which was the principal vehicle for educational services and which determined the contents of the curricula.2 The purpose of this article is to present a brief sketch of the most significant characteristics of this transformation.

Human Capital and Other Determinants of the Price Life Cycle of a Slave: Peru and La Plata in the Eighteenth Century

Toward the end of the eighteenth century Spanish America had about 400,000 slaves, which made 3 percent of the population. Before this time the importance of slavery had been greater, having received a large stimulus because of the sharp demographic decline of the natives following the Conquest. The arrival of Africans meant that in 1650 the proportion of slaves to total population was from 5 to 10 percent.

Spanish American elementary education 1950–1992: Bureaucracy, growth and decentralization

Abstract The purpose of this article is to trace the evolution of elementary education in Spanish America during the last four decades, by way of a broad analysis that allows the principal problems to be placed in their historical context. Given the wide scope of the subject, this account is necessarily schematic and general, putting more emphasis on that which the countries have in common than on their differences. Among the questions dealt with is the changing direction of educational policies, the most representative features of the administrative bodies, and the development of schools and teachers. Finally, the quantitative evolution is analyzed through statistics covering such matters as literacy, enrolment and repetition.

Spanish American Elementary Education Before Independence: Continuity and Change in a Colonial Environment

The historiography dealing with the evolution of elementary education in the Spanish American colonial period is relatively abundant. However, a great part of the literature has a regional or national scope, and in general does not give an idea of tendencies or the scale of education, which makes a general evaluation difficult. This paper tries to present such an evaluation based on the available secondary sources, and covers the whole of Spanish America during the century prior to Independence. It attempts to describe concisely both the consolidation of the institutions which had been evolving since the Conquest, and the series of changes which, it concludes, anticipate the educational transformations of the nineteenth century.

The Crowding Out Effect in Education: The Case of Buenos Aires in the Nineteenth Century.

The privatization of public schools in the city of Buenos Aires form 1838 to 1852 provides a case to test the functioning of educational markets and the relationship between private and public supply of education.

Un análisis de los determinantes del precio de los esclavos hispanoamericanos en el siglo XVIII

espanolEl articulo analiza los determinantes del ciclo vital del precio de los esclavos, concentrandose especialmente en el impacto del capital humano, tanto en capacitacion como en salud. Se describe el origen de la muestra utilizada - que incluye mas de dos mil esclavos hispanoamericanos del siglo XVIII- y se discute su fiabilidad; mas adelante se describen sus caracteristicas en el marco historico-geografico. Se pasa luego a una investigacion sobre los factores que afectan los precios para una variedad de actividades economicas. EnglishThis paper analyzes the determinants of the price life cycle of a slave, dealing particularly with the impact of human capital, both with respect to skills and health. The paper details the source of the sample -including more than two thousand Spanish American slaves of the 18th century- and discusses its reliability, moving on to a descriptive analysis in the geographic and historical context. Later on, it looks at the factors influencing price in several types of economic activity.

Ingresos y capital humano: el caso de Buenos Aires a mediados del siglo XIX

En este trabajo se efectua una contrastacion de la teoria del capital humano, utilizando para ello una muestra correspondiente a la ciudad de Buenos Aires en 1852. Este es uno de los raros casos en que para el siglo XIX se ha obtenido la informacion necesaria para construir ecuaciones de ingresos. Entre las conclusiones del analisis destaca la ausencia de una relacion entre salarios y alfabetizacion. En cambio, para los propietarios se observa una relacion significativa entre educacion y rentas. Estos resultados son interpretados y comparados con los obtenidos en estudios referidos a otras regiones de la misma epoca.