ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief overview of the colonial schooling before turning to examine the ways in which Latin Americans have used education and schooling to create cultural shifts. It explores the history of popular and rural schooling in modern Latin America as a locus for conflict and negotiation over modernization and as cause and consequence of social and cultural change. The chapter focuses on rural and popular education, by which we mean elementary schooling. Elementary education was often all that was available in rural areas; similarly, it was often all that was available to the popular classes in urban settings as well. A focus on rural and popular education, in many places of Latin America, necessarily also means a focus on indigenous education. The first attempt to nationalize Colombian education did not begin until 1868 as the federal government, in Liberal hands, moved to fund and centralize control over primary education and to make attendance obligatory.
