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 by Olga Lucía Zuluaga. This 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 disseminator of active Pedagogy; Dr. José Francisco Socarrás (1906-1995), rector of the Escuela Normal Superior, the first public institution for university training of teachers; the teacher Estanislao Zuleta (1935-1990), self-taught philosopher and intellectual critic of the capitalist system and its educational institutions; Marco Raúl Me jía Jiménez (1952), promoter of critical pedagogy and manager of popular education in Colombia; Francisco Cajiao Restrepo (1947), graduate in philosophy and economics, driver of contemporary debate in education; and “professor” Antanas Mockus Šivickas (1952-), mathematician, philosopher, pedagogue, university rector, mayor of Bogotá, presidential candidate and current senator-elect for the Green Alliance party. They have been, without a doubt, 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 us. However, it is not easy to find a common name for all of them: teachers, pedagogues, educational intellectuals, educational policy officials, cultural agents...? It is not allowed to respond with an easy “all of the above”, because although each of them held several of those positions, perhaps all of them, not all of them were schoolteachers, nor were they all such State officials… But there is one more reason. deep to think twice, before labeling them as a group or each one in particular: the historical reason that consists of understanding that all these names or roles do not apply in the same way in different periods of our "educational evolution." Calling yourself a “pedagogue,” let's say, did not mean the same to Don Martín Restrepo Mejía and his contemporaries in 1910 as it does to us contemporaries of “Professor” Antanas Mockus or Maestro 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 flowed in a single direction, without leaps or breaks, without setbacks or recurrences.