Historia del pensamiento pedagógico colombiano: Una mirada desde los maestros e intelectuales de la educación

Abstract

The reader will find gathered here seven biographical fragments intended to reactivate the memory of Colombian pedagogical practice, according to an expression of Olga Lucía Zuluaga. It is a selection of the vital and intellectual trajectories of men such as Don Martín Restrepo Mejía (1861-1940), official pedagogue of the Regeneration and the conservative Hegemony; Don Agustín Nieto Caballero (1889-1975), emblematic pedagogue of the liberal Republic and diffuser of active Pedagogy; Dr. José Francisco Socarrás (1906-1995), rector of the Escuela Normal Superior, the first public institution for the university training of teachers; teacher Estanislao Zuleta (1935-1990), self-taught philosopher and critical intellectual of the capitalist system and its educational institutions; Marco Raúl Mejía Jiménez (1952), promoter of critical pedagogy and manager of popular education in Colombia; Francisco Cajiao Restrepo (1947), a graduate in philosophy and economics, driving force of contemporary debate in education; and “profe” Antanas Mockus Šivickas (1952- ), mathematician, philosopher, educator, university rector, mayor of Bogotá, presidential candidate and current elected senator for the Alianza Verde party. They have undoubtedly been significant actors in the history of our modern educational system —in the broad arc that spans from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century—, and their lives provide keys to understanding ourselves. However, it is not easy to find a common name for all of them: teachers, educators, intellectuals of education, officials of educational policy, cultural agents…? It is not permissible to respond with an easy “all of the above,” because although each of them occupied several of those positions, perhaps all of them, not all of them were school teachers, nor were they all State officials… But there is a deeper reason to think twice before labeling them as a group or each one in particular: the historical reason that consists in understanding that all of those names or roles do not apply in the same way in different periods of our “educational evolution.” Calling oneself “pedagogue,” let’s say, did not mean the same thing for Don Martín Restrepo Mejía and his contemporaries in 1910, as it did for us, the contemporaries of “profe” Antanas Mockus or of the teacher Estanislao Zuleta. Although the persistence of a certain family resemblance must be recognized, we are not sure that the aforementioned evolution of our educational systems has run in a single direction, without leaps or ruptures, without setbacks or recurrences.