Liberalism and Education in Colombia in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The paper takes the Foucauldian conception of liberalism to think the education in the beginning of the XIX century in La Nueva Granada. It shows the connection that exists between the liberal government and the Lancastrian educational method, as a particularly visible moment of the immanence among the actual form of the power and the school as a form of education. The paper develops the following idea: should the epidemical expansion of the Lancastrian method be assumed from local interpretations? Or, on the contrary, should it be read from the concomitant expansion of the liberal forms of power? The intention is to show that while the educational practice helped to distinguish a disciplinary Western society; it is also possible, from the point of view of the constant liberty’s production that the liberal power requires in order to rule the population, to retake the actual form of power to explain educational and academic processes.