ABSTRACT
Latin America was discovered by Columbus in 1492, almost 120 years before the first British colony was founded in North America. The conquests by Spain of the Caribbean islands, Mexico, Central America, and South America followed in the next decades. Education in Latin America, grounded on the religious concept, was deductive, scholastic, and based on rote memorization, but in the US colonies it was inductive, pragmatic, empirical, and problem-solving. The US and Latin America went in very different directions largely on the basis of the quite distinct principles and institutions on which each was founded: Latin America in quasi-feudalism and the thirteen North American colonies in modernity. Latin America was thus founded on an ideology, a set of principles and institutions, and in a time period - still the middle ages - before the onset of Western modernization.
