Introduction: education vis-à-vis racial and cultural determinism

French social thinker and pedagogue Edmond Demolins reported his impression of the Argentines’ attitude towards progress as a matter of racial weakness compared to the sturdiness of North Americans. ‘Why?’, he continued, ‘Simply because [the latter] are more convinced of the full responsibility of each individual man’. As Latin Americans swayed between the modernizing cosmopolitanism of the Latin narrative and the search for an authentically American way of life, concerns were growing around coherent national projects that could push the region to the centre of the modern world stage. How were Latin American countries to catch up in the race of progress? During the first decade of the twentieth century, the role of education increasingly came to occupy a central place in debates on the constitution of a healthy national character that would be able to withstand the challenges of the modern world. As I discuss earlier in this work, the culturalist and historicist approaches to the notion of race recognized cultural and educational institutions as a means through which the Latin inheritance had been passed on.

In Chile the well-known essay by Edmond Demolins, A quoi tient la superiorité des Anglo-Saxons? (1897), was widely read. While ideas on the inferiority of the Latin race were articulated by a number of European intellectuals, mainly in France and Italy, Demolins's theory focused primarily on the structure of educational systems. His comparative analysis of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon educational and political models became a key source for the Spanish regeneracionistas, and around the same time, arguably following the Spanish translation, it was popularized in the Southern Cone. As I will show, in Argentina Demolins's pedagogical theories on the detrimental effects of the Latin educational system on modern societies had to stand the test of a solidly social Darwinist tradition.