Читать книгу Readings from Modern Mexican Authors - Группа авторов - Страница 13

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When the first Spanish missionaries arrived, they faced that great mass of uncivilized folk, which it was necessary to convert and civilize in a single day. Today there exist an enormous number of establishments and private teachers for educating youth in classes, graded with relation to ages; there were then twelve men for millions of children and adults, who begged, in concert, for light, and light which it was impossible to deny them, because it was not merely a matter of human culture, which most important as it is, did not then occupy the first place; but of opening the eyes to blind heathen and of making them take the straight road for attaining the salvation of their souls. The matter then seemed serious; it was really still more so, because the new teachers had never heard the language of their pupils. But what may not devotion accomplish? Those venerable men quickly mastered the unknown language and then others and others as they met them; they understood, or rather they divined, the peculiar character of the population, and at once converted, instructed, and protected it. The first missionaries and those who followed after them, were certainly no common men; almost all were educated; many like Fathers Tecto, Gaona, Focher, Vera Cruz, and others had shone in professorships and prelacies; they were of noble birth, and three of them, Fathers Gante, Witte, and Daciano, felt royal blood coursing through their veins. All renounced the advantages promised by a brilliant career; all forgot their hard gained learning to devote themselves to the primary instruction of the poor and unprotected Indians. What inflated doctor, what betitled professor today would accept a primary school in an obscure village?

The Franciscans went everywhere rearing temples to the true God, and with them schools for children. They gave to their principal convents a special plan; the church set from east to west and the school, with its dormitories and chapel at right angles to it, stretching to the north. The square of buildings was completed by the ample court, which served for teaching the Christian doctrine to adults, in the morning before work, and also for the sons of the macehuales or plebeians who came to receive religious instruction; the school building was reserved for the sons of nobles and lords; although this distinction was not rigidly observed.

At first the friars found great difficulty in gathering together boys to fill these schools, because the Indians were not yet capable of understanding the importance of the new discipline and refused to give their boys to the monasteries. They had to appeal to the government that it should compel the lords and principal men to send their sons to the schools; first experiment in compulsory education. Many of the lords, not caring to give up their children, but not daring to disobey, adopted the expedient of sending, in place of their own sons, and as if they were these, other boys, sons of their servants or vassals. But in time, perceiving the advantage these plebeian boys, by education, were gaining over their masters, they sent their sons to the monasteries, and even insisted on their being admitted. The boys dwelt in the lodgings built for the purpose in connection with the schools, some so spacious as to suffice for eight hundred or a thousand. The friars devoted themselves by preference to the children, as being—from their youth—more docile and apt to learn, and found in them most useful helpers. Soon they employed them as teachers. The adults brought from their wards by their leaders, came to the patios and remained there during the hours set for instruction, after which they were free for their ordinary occupations. Divided into groups, one of the best instructed boys taught to each group the lesson learned from the missionary.