State and Nation Making in Latin

America and Spain

Republics of the Possible

Edited by
MIGUEL A. CENTENO
Princeton University

AGUSTIN E. FERRARO
University of Salamanca

UCAMBRIDGE
9 UNIVERSITY PRESS
 Ricardo D. Salvatore

coincided with the gendering of teaching at the elementary school level. The
12
Radical administrations let the salaries fall for common school teachers until
it became an employment preferred by women but rejected by men. Y rigoyen
and Alvear presided over the risiog cost of secondary education, a system that
Elite Preferences, Administrative Institutions,
produced much political leverage through the allocation of good positions to
political sympathizers, most of them men. and Educational Development during Peru's
Aristocratic Republic (1895-I9I9)

Hillel D. Soifer

The Aristocratic Republic (r895-r9r9) is commonly seen as the apogee of elite

liberalism in Peru. During this period, political leaders responded to the eco-
nomic crisis and social fragmentation they saw by attempting to bring order
and progress to a country torn by defeat io the War of the Pacific and the
subsequent internal conflict. A broad coalition, centered on a rising export
elite and a new class of miners, merchants, and industrialists, supported the
rise of Nicolas Pierola to the presidency.' Pierola's program, which empha-
sized "the value of liberal economic theory, centralized administration, and an
ordered society designed to protect the interests of the elite against the unruly
masses," captures the Civilista project of state building and social intervention
that would dominate Peruvian politics for the next twenty-five years. A core 2

element of this Civilista program of liberal reforms was an insertion of the cen-
tral state into local education policy. For the first time, the central state would
do more than issue decrees in Lima and lament their evanescent effects in the
provinces. Instead, Pifrola and his successors would seek to exercise greater
oversight over educational develoPment rather than, as in the past, leaving it in
the hands of local forces.
This chapter explores the Civilista educational project as an iostance of lib-
eral state building. It traces the motivations behind the focus on educational
development in this period as well as the earlier Liberal projects of the guano
era. It compares the means by which policymakers io Lima sought to foment
and standardize primary schooling. Contrasting the more successful record
of the Civilista reform program_ with guano-era failures, I show that design-
ing administrative institutions that took local oversight out of the hands of
local elites was key to the Civilista success. Driven back into alliance with
highland elites by rural unrest after 1915, the Civilistas began to dismantle

1
Rosemary Thorp and Geoffrey Bertram, Peru r8go-r977: Growth and Policy in an Open
Economy (New York: Columbia University Press, I978).
~ Michael J. Gonzales, Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Peru, r875-I933
(Austin: University of Texas Press, I978), 24.

247
 Hillel D. Soifer
their new independent administrative apparatus, and this undermined gains in
schooling.
The rise and fall of educational development over these two decades reveals
three factors crucial to state building. First, the commitment of state leaders
to increasing their authority - to state building (defined in this chapter as the
penetration and systematization of public primary schooling through society
nationwide)- cannot be taken as a constant; the commitment of national elites
acts as a scope condition for this endeavor to succeed. Second, the central~
ization of education administration under national government authority was
necessary for its development, but it was far from sufficient. Educational devel-
opment only took place when local bureaucracy- the third, crucial element-
was purged of local elites, who were replaced by administrators without social
power in the communities where they served.
The Civilistas achieved some of their intended gains in educational devel-
opment because they made institutional changes at the central and local lev-
els. When they were pressed to undo these institutional changes and let local
elites oversee schooling, their gains quickly eroded. The study of early twen-
tieth-century Peruvian educational development thus reveals that "order" and
"progress" can rarely be pursued simultaneously in conditions of high social
inequality and complex political economy; the costly and wrenching tradeoffs
between these two goals underpin the tribulations of state builders in Peru and
far beyond. This study also provides the first systematic analysis of the r902
educational census, which provides uniquely fine-grained data on the state of
Peruvian education.
LIMA LEARNS ABOUT THE CRISIS OF SCHOOLING
When the Civilistas took power, they had little specific information about the
state of schooling in the interior. Although an office of educational statistics had
been founded in r89o, it relied on self-reporting by teachers and other local
officials, data that arrived in a spotty fashion and was often of questionable
quality. School inspectors were rotated through the country and filed reports
highlighting the abysmal condition of schools, but their numbers were small
and the territory each covered was vast. These inspectors laid the blame for the
failures of Peru's schools on the inability or unwillingness of local authorities to
raise the necessary funds from their communities.3 The dramatic shortcomings
of primary education would come as a surprise to a reader of the Education
Ministry's Memorias of the pre-Civilista period, because these had focused on
legislation and planning rather than on the conditions on the ground.
Information on the state of schools appeared in a series of muckraking
exposes by commissions and special inspectors. A striking example was the
report of the r899 Congress of School Hygiene, which focused on the sanitary
J MIP I897, !xi; MIP IB98, 4I5ff. Where MIP refers to the Memoria del Ministerio de Justicia,
Culto, e Instrucci6n PUblica for the corresponding year.
Educational Development in Peru 249
conditions of schools. This congress issued 162 recommendations, which were
delivered directly to the president and included in full in the r9oo Memoria
of the Education minister. These indicated that many parts of the country
lacked schools altogether, and that existing schools were often "homicidal"
and "unhealthy." The report also argued that local control was preventing the
progress of primary education. This message, which also appeared in other
reports, resonated with the Civilista policymakers. Centralizing control over
education was driven, in part, by liberal ideology. • But it was also an ad-hoc
response to the failures of schooling since educational administration had been
decentralized in r873. Believing that decentralization was not a promising
route to educational development, and seeing confirmatory evidence for that
view in the track record of schooling as exposes trickled into Lima, the new
regime sought to centralize educational administration.
In an effort to better assess the problems they faced, and to prepare the
ground for the political and policy battles ahead, the Education Ministry
turned to carrying out a national census. This would provide the first system-
atic accounting of the state of schools since the 1876 census, and in so doing
also help bolster their case of the need for centralized administration. The
administration of the census reveals the ambitions and the limitations of the
Civilista attempt to increase the reach of the central state into communities
throughout the national territory. The findings shed light on the conditions of
schooling before their efforts took root, providing a way to assess pre-Civilista
educational development and a baseline on which evaluations of the Civilista
project can be constructed.
A detailed examination of the census sheds light on two aspects of the state's
power in the realm of education. First, I analyze the administration of the cen-
sus itself, which shows the limited and uneven reach of the state in terms of
its ability to collect information from residents. Second, I use the information
collected on enrollment and literacy in each of Peru's 7 4 5 districts to paint a
detailed picture of schooling in Peru, which reflects the extent of state build-
ing to that date. This provides a baseline for examining the track record of the
Civilistas and assessing the extent and limits of state building during their two
decades in power.
CENSUS ADMINISTRATION AND STATE POWER
We can assess the Peruvian state~s power in several distinct dimensions in exam-
ining the census. First, we can see its weakness in its uneven reach through
society and territory: as discussed further later in this chapter, information
could not be collected in some parts of the country, though the vast majority
of the population was surveyed. Second, we can observe the state's power in
4 Carlos Contreras, Ideales Democrd#cos, Rea/;dades Autoritarias: Autoridades politicas locales y
descentralizaci6n en el PerU a finales del siglo XIX (Lima: IEP, 20oi), Documento de Trabajo #
Il3·
250 Hillel D. Soifer
the complex interactions initiated by the census between state and society and
within the state. The ability of the state to implement its policy - the core of
Michael Mann's concept of state infrastructural power>- unfolded through the
relationship between the central state and the officials tasked with implemen-
tation. It can also be seen through the image of the state in the eyes of social
actors, which made (in some cases) their compliance more difficult to achieve,
and through the direct relationship between local state agents collecting census
information and the societal actors whose homes were entered during the ten
days of collection. 6 All of these aspects of the census administration shed light
on the infrastructural power of the Peruvian state.
As the r902 censo was planned, its designers faced severe fiscal constraints.
Policymakers strove to design a way to collect systematic information about
the state of primary education without great expense. To do so, they decided
to rely on the existing bureaucracy where possible, rather than sending census
takers throughout the country. Where escuelas oficiales existed, teachers were
charged with collecting information in their districts, and schools were closed
for ten days to allow them to complete this task. In districts that had no official
teachers, the burden of census administration was placed on governors, lieu-
tenant governors, and the rural police. This reliance on untrained officials was
described by census organizers as a source of some problems in administration
(p. xi), but efforts were made to limit the inconsistency that could be expected
from the absence of professional census collectors. Standard forms were
designed in Lima and distributed nationwide, and procedures were designed to
ensure that every household was covered (pp. vi-vii). With this approach, the
census was said to cost only 3 87 Peruvian pounds to administer (p. xii).'
Organizers estimated that they reached three-quarters of the national ter-
ritory and nine-tenths of the population (p. x). To do so, they had to rely on
"coercive means'' in some places to motivate local officials to return the forms
(p. x). Beyond the limits imposed by reliance on an untrained and sometimes
incompetent or unresponsive staff of administrators, the director of primary
education noted (p. xi) that other sources of difficulty included the vagueness
of provincial and district boundaries, the slow mail service that delayed the
receipt of completed forms in some districts, (compounded by the huge dis-
tances that had to be covered to reach those districts from the provincial and
5 Mann, Michael, "The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results,"
Arch;ves Europienes de Sociologie 25 (r984): r8 5-213.
6 For a more detailed account of these three facets of infrastructural power, embodied in these
three relationships, see Hillel David Soifer, "State Infrastructural Power: Approaches to
Conceptualization and Measurement," Studies in Comparat;ve International Development
43, no. 3-4 (November 2008): 231-251. A similar set of distinctions is made in Joel Migdal,
State-in-Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Cons#tute One Another
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2oor).
7 By comparison, the introductory letter to the censo cites a similar educational census conducted
.in Argentina .in r89 5 that is said to have required one hundred full-time employees to work for
several years and cost 50,ooo pesos (pp. xi-xii).
Educational Development in Peru
departmental capitals), the "ignorance" of "certain mayors and governors,"
and the suspicion of local communities. The introductory letter to the census
describes "efforts made by residents of some comarcas to prevent the inclusion
of their children," motivated by the belief that the census was being conducted
with the "hidden end of incorporating them into the milicia or of collecting
information to create some new tax." 8 (p. xi)
As Centeno writes, the execution of a census implies that "government rep-
resentatives not only have authority to ask sometimes difficult questions, but
can also be protected from random violence while performing their tasks."'
With that in mind, we can use the performance of the clmso escolar itself as a
window into the power of the Peruvian state. An analysis of its administration
suggests that the reach of the state was uneven. Filiberto Ramirez, the direc-
tor of primary education, acknowledged as much in the letter of presentation,
informing the minister of education that the analysis covered nine-tenths of
Peru's school-age population and three-quarters of its national territory. The
reach of the census was uneven both across regions and within each district. ro
First, the census report acknowledges that data was missing altogether from
the province of Ucayali. Although this was the only province missing in its
entirety, I 5 districts were also listed in the text as missing all data. 11 In the
detailed data on each province, a list of all locations for which data was missing
is provided for each district. Of the 745 districts listed, 569 are noted as hav-
ing incomplete data collection. This suggests that census administration faced
ubiquitous difficulty, as some locations were missed in three-fourths of the dis-
tricts in the average province. Of 96 provinces, only 6 had no missing locations
8
This fear suggests that even aspects of state building that do not revolve around the traditional
taxation-bureaucratic development dynamic can be affected by a similarly antagonistic relation-
ship between state and societal actors. Thus, although Slater argues that the growth of nontax
aspects of state power - electoral registration, for example - can under some circumstances
engender distinct dynamics of state-society relations, this does not appear to be such a case. See
Dan Slater, "Can Leviathan be Democratic? Competitive Elections, Robust Mass Politics, and
State Infrastructural Power," Studies in Comparative International Development 43, no. 3-4
(2oo8): 252-272.
9
Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University
Park: Penn State University Press, 2002), IO.
10
The district was Peru's smallest administrative unit; the country was divided .into provinces,
which contained departments. These, in turn, were divided into districts.
n The list includes: Suyo district .in the~department of Piura, the districts of Leyrnebamba, Totora,
Chiliquin, Santa Rosa, Lavanto, Balsas .in the department of Amazonas, San Gregorio district
in the department of Cajamarca, the districts of Huambo, Corongo, Cabana, Pallasca, Llapo,
and Lampa in Ancash, and San Agustin .in Lima department. Three provinces in Loreto (Alto
Amazonas, Baja Amazonas, and San Martin) appear to have additional districts with missing
data, but the annotations in the body of the censo are unclear as to whether these are districts
or other types of jurisdictions. Confusingly, although the letter of presentation (p. x) states that
77 districts are missing data, there is no corresponding list anywhere in the text. Additionally,
summary tables at the end of the censo (pp. 578ff) list 27 districts for which significant data is
said to be missing, including the district of Andoas (Loreto), which appears nowhere else in the
document.
 Hillel D. Soifer
in any district: Paita (Piura), Callao, Condesuyos (Arequipa), Anta (Cuzco),
Moquegua, and Tarata (Tacna). At the other extreme, 32 provinces were miss-
ing data for every district, and 2 5 more had only a single complete district.
Missingness, in other words, is rampant in this census. The district-level entries
themselves are also plagued by incompleteness. In 56 districts, I found that no
data at all about population or male education and literacy was recorded- and
in many cases, the blank data from these districts are actually listed in the cen-
sus as being complete. The ubiquity of missing data in the census demonstrates
the weakness of the Peruvian state by revealing that it had real difficulty in col-
lecting data on the state of education- or even on the population- from many
parts of the national territory.
The implementation of the census thus suggests that as of I9o2, the reach of
the Peruvian state was limited and uneven. It appears to have been particularly
weak in the Amazonian regions of the country: data collectors in Loreto and
Amazonas departments had particularly daunting tasks. But the most consis-
tent pattern to emerge from this analysis - from the fact that data from some
locations in 569 of 7 4 5 districts is missing - is that the state's reach into small
communities and rural areas was vestigial at best during this time. While data
collection appears to have been adequate in many of the country's cities, and in
provincial capitals, the caserios and haciendas that dotted Peru's rural areas-
and the country was still mostly rural at this time -were much less likely to be
reached by census takers. a
THE CENSUS AS SOURCE: STATE WEAKNESS AND PRE-CIVILISTA
EDUCATION IN PERU
Despite all the limitations discussed previously, the census contains a great deal
of information about literacy and school enrollment in Peru, disaggregated
to the district level. An analysis of this data reflects the limited power of the
pre-Civilista state - its ability to use the school system to shape its residents
and inculcate them as it chose. Of course, the census itself tells us nothing
about the content of education, which is crucial in assessing this aspect of state
power, nor about its systematization and control; Civilista initiatives in these
areas are discussed in subsequent sections. But the census does allow us to
paint a picture of the reach of the school system through the Peruvian territory
in the early years of the Aristocratic Republic.
To assess educational development, I used district-level data from the body
of the census. Of the 7 4 3 districts listed in the document, complete data was
available for 686. '' This section analyzes the distribution of education and
... This characteristic of the census coincides with the view espoused by (among others) Contreras
and Cueto that the Peruvian state was a "fiction" in much of the country's interior during
the guano era and its aftermath. See Carlos Contreras and Marcos Cueto, Historia del PerU
Contemporaneo (Lima: IEP, 1999), q6.
' 1 The census claims 745 districts, but only 743 have entries in the data tables and are therefore
included in this analysis.
Educational Development in Peru 2 53
literacy through those districts. The census included information on the num-
ber of children (by gender) aged four to fourteen who could read, who could
write, and who were "receiving instruction"- that is, were enrolled in school.
To maximize the variation across districts, this analysis focuses on the findings
for the male population - female literacy and school enrollment rates were
consistently lower than male rates, and therefore exhibit less variation across
districts. Additionally, missingness was a bigger problem in the data for girls,
and thus the data for boys allows greater coverage.
A first glance at the state of education as of I902 can be obtained by aver-
aging across the districts. The average district (unweighted for population size)
had a male literacy rate (reading) of 30.9 percent and a male literacy rate
(writing) of I9.9 percent. The proportion of the school-age population receiv-
ing instruction was 2 7 ·4 percent. In all, we can conclude that a substantial
minority of the male population was reached by the school system, although
this figure varied widely across the district: twelve districts claim to have had
roo percent enrollment, while in others - according to their own reporting-
there was apparently no primary school system. I4 The cross-district variation
in enrollment and literacy is sizable, as reflected in the fact that the standard
deviations around the district averages vary from I7·4 percent (for writing
proficiency) to 24-9 percent for enrollment rate.''
How can this broad variation be explained? The analysis hereinafter finds
that the ethnic composition of the population had a large and significant effect
on its schooling and literacy performance. This was, as will be discussed, a
reflection not only of the decentralization of the immediately preceding decades,
but of an overall failure of the Peruvian state to penetrate much of the national
territory in the nineteenth century, which left educational development in the
hands of local elites.
I use data in the I9o2 census on the ethnic composition of the population
at the district level, which divides population into four categories: white, mes-
tizo, indigenous, and black. 16 Usillg a simple linear regression model (run once
'~ The figures for school enrollment in this census are far higher than Newland's figure of 2.6%
enrollment for the whole population. Notice, however, that the aggregate figures reported in
Table 12.1 are based on averages across districts, unweighted for population. The actual rates
are 32.1% for reading proficiency, 22.r% for writing proficiency, and 28.4% for school enroll-
ment. As a crude estimate (used by Chilean demographers at the time) we can estimate that the
school-age population was one-fifth of the total population. If we multiply Newland's figure by
five, we arrive at an estimated 13% enrollment rate for the school-age population, which is still
a much lower figure than the male C~rollment rate reported here. See Carlos Newland, "The
Estado Docente and its Expansion: Spanish American Elementary Education, 1900---1950,"
Journal of Latin American Studies 26, no. 2 (1994): 449-467.
'5 The correlations between reading proficiency, writing proficiency, and school enrollment rates
for a particular district are quite high: district-level rates of reading and writing proficiency are
correlated at o.825. Reading and school enrollment rates are correlated at 0.702, and writing
and school enrollment are correlated at a similarly high o.678.
6
' To capture the effect of the immigration (Chinese and other), I also conducted the analyses with
the foreign-born proportion of the population, but the effect was consistently both small and
statistically insignificant. These results are omitted from this chapter.
254 Hillel D. Soifer Educational Development in Peru 2 55

TABLE r 2. I. Regression Results contrast, has no significant effect in any of the models. For models one and
three, which examine the literacy rate and enrollment rate respectively, the
Model One Model Two Model Three white proportion of the population has a significant and positive effect on
Dep. Var. Literacy Rate Writin,g Rate Enrollment Rate educational development. In the same two models, district size has a negative
effect, which is surprising given that we commonly associate urbanization
B S.E B S.E B S.E with school development. This effect is also sizable; a district with more than
Foreign 0.465 0.609 0.002 0.469 -0.430 0.710 one thousand residents will have a reading proficiency rate 5 ·4 percent lower,
White 0.130c 0.043 0.044 0.033 O.IJ8b o.osr and an enrollment rate 4.6 percent lower, than a district with a smaller popu-
Indigenous -o.r62c O.OJO -0.12Ic 0.023 -O.IJ8c 0.036 lation with all else held constant.
Black -0.110 0.250 -0.036 0.192 -O,OJI 0.291 In all three models, districts that are provincial cab.eceras outperformed
Large pop. -0.054b 0.024 -0.024 0.018 -0.046a 0.028 their predicted levels of educational development. The status of cabecera
Prov. cap. 0.047a 0.024 0.054b 0.019 0.047a 0.028 added about 5 percent to the levels of all three dependent variables. Whereas
Apurimac -0.226a 0.126 -0.2.22b 0.097 -O.J09b 0.147 the overall results suggest that the central state had little penetration of much
Cuzco -o.r62a 0,095 -0.259a 0.144 of the national territory, this suggests that it was more effective in implement-
Puna -o.rs8a 0.092 -0.27Ja 0.140
ing policies in the districts that were the site of provincial and departmental
Hu3nuco -0.261a 0.148
Amazonas -0,299b 0.146
capitals. As I suggest later, this is likely a direct result of the state's greater
Piura -0.272a 0.147 presence in those districts: these are places where officials of nonlocal govern-
# obs. 686 686 686 ments - the prefects and subprefects of departmental and provincial adminis-
F 7.28 9·78 6.o6 tration -were found. Here, education policy was not left entirely to the hands
Prob>F 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 of municipal governments even under decentralization: school inspectors and
R-squared 0.223 I 0.2784 o.r866 other national officials were able to exercise some degree of oversight and
Adj. R-sq. 0.1924 0.2499 o.r558 enforcement.
Note: Departmental controls are only listed in these results where they are significant. The role of supralocal factors in educational development can also be seen
a significant at 90% level by examining the dummy variables included for each of the country's depart-
h significant at 9 5% level ments. Six of these had a significant and negative effect on educational devel-
c significant at 99% level
opment, and these effects were very large: a district in Apurimac (to select the
most dramatic case) had a 30.9 percent lower enrollment rate than an other-
for each of the three measures of educational development as the dependent wise equal district elsewhere in the country. Four of these six departments -
variable) I examine the effects of the white, indigenous, and black proportions Apurfmac, Puna, Cuzco, and Hminuco- are located in the central and southern
of the district population on the levels of literacy and school enrollment.'' I highlands, while Piura is located "on the northern coast, and Amazonas was (at
add control variables for the department (to account for the effects of policies the time) one of the country's two Amazonian departments. These findings
established at this level; the largest subnational unit) and for the (population) suggest that educational development in these regions faced particular chal-
size of the district (a dummy variable for districts with population of more lenges. Given Bela6nde's findings about the Amazon decades later, the weak-
than one thousand), as well as for whether the district was a cabecera or pro- ness of the state in that region is not surprising. ' 8 The limited development of
vincial capital. The results of these analyses are presented in Table I2.I. schooling in the four highland departments, even after controlling for the size
One result is consistent across all three models: at the district level, the of the indigenous population, is surprising, and suggests that another factor
indigenous proportion of the population is clearly associated with lower lev- must be relevant. The most likely suspects, for which I was not able to control
els of educational development. In all three cases, this effect is significant at in this analysis, are fiscal and economic characteristics at the department level:
the 99 percent level. The effect is quite large: for each additional IO percent these four departments were the poorest regions of Peru. The case of Piura is
of the population identified as indigenous, the reading proficiency rate falls
by r.6 percent, the writing proficiency rate by r.z percent, and the enroll-
ment rate by nearly 1.4 percent. The black proportion of the population, by '
8
Fernando BelaUnde Terry, Peru's Own Conquest (Lima: Latin American Studies Press, 1965).
See also, Deborah Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous
'7 The category for which I do not control is the mestizo proportion of the population; this is the Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
category with the most internal diversity, making it less theoretically relevant for the purpose of Fernando Santos Granero and Frederica Barclay, La Frontera Domesticada: Historia Econ6mica
this analysis. y Social de Loreto I85o-2ooo (Lima: PUCP, 2002).
 Hillel D. Soifer Educational Development in Peru 257

particularly surprising, but there are (as far as I know) few regional histories LIMA'S COMMITMENT TO EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
of that department that might reveal an explanatiOn for 1ts dtstmcttvely poor
National leaders in pre-Civilista Peru championed educational development,
educational performance.
seeing the transformation of the indigenous population as a necessary step
The most important finding revealed by the census, however, is that as the
toward national progress. The moderate Liberals of the nineteenth century
indigenous proportion of the population increased, educational development
believed that the means to progress and civilization depended on the state's
declined. This effect, as described earlier, is not only statistically significant (at
ability to expand its reach through the national territory - and education was
the 99% level) but large in magnitude. Broadening our focus from the census
one element of that project. The midcentury guano boom provided the state
to a more sweeping evaluation of Peruvian education, the next section of the
with the resources needed to undertake this project of social transformation,
chapter seeks to explain that finding and discuss its implications for our vision
because most of the revenue from guano sales was retained by the Peruvian
of the pre-Civilista state.
government. :z.o As Gootenberg shows, guano revenues allowed state leaders and
political elites to design projects of economic and social transformation. 2 ~ ~nd
EXPLAINING EDUCATIONAL STAGNATION IN much of the revenue flowing into state coffers was spent on state-bmldmg
NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERU efforts: 29 percent on expanding the civilian bureaucracy, 24.5 percent on mil-
itary development, and 20 percent on railroad construction.
The decrease in educational development as the indigenous proportion of the
The economic element of state-building efforts generally centered on export
population rises might reflect the reticence of indigenous families or communi-
promotion. Midcentury political elites sought to boost agricultural and mining
ties to enroll their children in schools - but if this were true, we would expect
production so that the country could diversify away from guano and gener-
the broader historical record to show signs of resistance by Peru's indigenous
ate customs revenues on other products. This plan was centered on boost-
population to educational development in the nineteenth century. Although
ing production in the heavily indigenous southern highlands, which - among
there are isolated mentions of this reluctance in government records, the over-
other political and social benefits -would draw the indigenous population into
all pattern does not reflect a state that sought to educate its indigenous popu-
the market economy.'' Despite the liberal rhetoric and the liberal-tinged focus
lation but was confronted by refusals to enroll. Rural schools, it is true, often
on trade as the means to economic development and social transformation, a
saw low attendance because children were needed for agricultural labor, but
major role was reserved for the state. Castilla and his advisors intended to use
this effect was limited to attendance rather than enrollment and was no more
the state to overcome the obstacles to development via free trade: to substitute
true for indigenous children than for others.
for the lack of private capital, to promote immigration, and (most relevant for
The broader pattern was one of low school provision in rural areas where
our purposes) to better integrate the indigenous population into the market
the indigenous population was concentrated. The absence of schools, rather
economy. 23
than the reticence of residents, explains the low enrollment rates. An analysts
In addition to export promotion, industrial development was an element
of the state of public education in r897 finds that only eight of the country's
of the midcentury Liberal project. Beyond its economic effects, industry was
eighty-seven provinces had more than one school per one thousand school-age
also seen as a symbol of progress in Peru. :q It was also seen - in the writings
children, and that all of these outliers on the high end were in urban areas. ' 9
of Juan Norberta Casanova in the I84os - as a means of social transforma-
This suggests that to understand why the indigenous population is associated
tion: the movement of Peru's poor and indigenous population into the fac-
with low levels of educational development, we need to understand why efforts
tory would provide an opportunity to discipline them and introduce order into
to build schools in these districts were so limited. The historical record shows
Peru's unstable social fabric.'' Efforts were made to integrate the indigenous
that national officials were quite invested in educational development, seeing
population into the republican legal framework as well, most notably the r 8 54
it as an element of a broader project of bringing modernity to Peru. But local
elites, who were charged with implementing the edicts from Lima, were indif- 20
Shane J. Hunt, "Growth and Guano in Nineteenth Century Peru," in The Latin American
ferent and sometimes hostile to building schools. It was this dynamic that led Economies: Growth and the Export Sector I88o-I9JO, ed. Roberto Cortes Conde and Shane].
nineteenth-century education-building efforts to founder. And it was the exclu- Hunt (New York: Holmes and Meier Press, 1985), 255-319.
sion of local elites from education policy implementation that would underpin ,_, Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of
the gains of the Civilista era. Guano, r84o-r88o {Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
n Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation-Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2004),r so.
z3 Gootenberg, Imagining Development, 27ff.

19 Hillel David Soifer, Authority Over Distance: Institutions and Long-Run Variation in State z4 Ibid., 44·

Development in Latin America (Unpublished manuscript, Temple University, n.d.). zs Ibid., 45 ff.
 Hillel D. Soifer
elimination of the indigenous head tax. This was a signal that all Peruvians
would be treated under the same set of laws and have the same rights and
responsibilities - a hallmark of the modern, unified, rationalized society that
Liberals sought to build.•'
Railroads, too, served both economic and social purposes in the project of
modernization. As Gootenberg summarizes, they were the centerpiece of an
effort to increase the state's reach into the highlands. This would allow more
effective response to local unrest and would reduce the remoteness of far-flung
communities, creating "moral uplifting," "rural mobility, cultural contact, and
thus enlightenment among peasants."'' Railroad officials claimed that train
lines would resolve the fact that "two thirds of the country has yet to be made
Peruvian"•" and that "the railroad [would] be the most efficacious means for
creating the healthy and intelligent proletariat" through increasing "commu-
nication of [indigenous Peruvians] with whites." 2 9 Trains, Manuel Pardo and
his associates believed, would be the means by which the state turned peasants
into Peruvians.
In r872, at the dusk of the guano boom, the midcentury Liberal project
reached its peak. The Pardo administration sought to use the state in a variety
of ways to assimilate the indigenous population. Implementing what Larson
calls "the first state-directed civilizing project in the Indian sierra,"'o Pardo
sought to spread schools into the highlands, rationalize the tax system, and
complement railroad building with roads linking more remote communities to
the train lines spreading into the Andes. With the collapse of guano revenues,
and the war with Chile, the window of opportunity for state building carne to
an end. Peru would enter a prolonged period of state crisis.
LOCAL CONTROL AND EDUCATIONAL STAGNATION
Guano-era efforts to build schools and other aspects of development had
shown little fruit. It is this failure, as much as the crisis of the long decade of
the r88os, that explains the weakness of the Peruvian state and its educational
system reflected in the r902 educational census. The root of failure lay in the
ability of local elites to undermine educational development. Both before and
after the r 873 decentralization, education policy was firmly in the hands of
16
In other countries such as Mexico and Colombia, the attempts to change the indigenous-state
relationship centered on challenges to indigenous corporate landholding and community
property rights. The absence of conflict over property rights in Peru reflects the more mod-
erate liberalism in that country. Brooke Larson, "Andean Highland Peasants and the Trials
of Nation-Making during the Nineteenth Century," in The Cambridge History of the Native
Peoples of the Americas, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, val. 3, part 2 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1999) 558-703.
2
7 Gootenberg, Imagining Development, 87.
28
Ibid., 92.
2
~ Ibid., 95·
JO Larson, Trials of Nation-Making, I 59·
Educational Development in Peru 259
local elites. In the pre-decentralization era, education policy was made in Lima.
But implementation was delegated to local officials such as teachers, school
directors, inspectors, and education bureaucrats. Positions of this kind were
not filled with appointees from Lima or outside the community. Instead, they
were given to local elites, who were in turn given "free rein" in the districts they
dominated.F After decentralization, the control of local elites over education
policy was heightened, but the change in formal institutions was marked by
more continuity than change.
This suggests that a focus on formal institutions of centralization and decen-
tralization must be complemented with an analysis of the actors involved in
the implementation of state-building efforts. Without the collaboration of
local elites, the efforts emanating from Lima foundered. The result was that
the intentions of the national government to spread quality schooling through
the country were diluted, and educational development languished.
Peruvian provincial and local authorities displayed little inclination to
contribute to school building, and they failed to enforce the policies emanat-
ing from Lima.3 2 For example, central ministry bureaucrats complained that
departments were declining the opportunity to hire normal school graduates
into the teaching corps because they did not want to pay their legal minimum
wage of 50 soles per month." Hundreds of government docwnents reviewed
contain few instances in which local state agents complained (for example)
about the quality of teachers in their districts. They rarely complained, for
example, about the quality of teachers they oversaw, and did not pressure the
national government to develop the school systern.H Also telling are the many
instances in which the national government had to pressure local authorities
to account for education funding it had provided and to explain why they had
not met the goals put forward in Lima. Local officials rarely spent even the
allocated funds for, and did as little as possible to facilitate, schooling.
Some local officials did their best to "actively thwart education."" Many
elites, to whom oversight over education policy had been delegated over the
past fifty years, held the view that the indigenous population under their pur-
view could not be educated.'' One example of this view appears in the writings
of Alejandro Deustua, who argued that the indigenous community "lacked all
culture and had no notion of nationality." He wondered what effect education
F Ulrich Muecke, Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru: The Rise of the Partido Civil
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 38.
}Z Ibid., I80-I83.
JJ MIP I897. lii-liii.
H Muecke (Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru, I80-I8I) points out that there was
some pressure on the government to replace school heads and teachers, but this was limited
to the moments of change of government and derived from the fact that these were patronage
appointments.
H M3.laga in Carmen Montero, ed., La Escuela Rural: Variaciones sabre un Tema (Lima: FAO,
1990), 95·
J
6 Muecke, Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru, I8I.
 Hillel D. Soifer
could have on those who, to him, "were not yet people, who did not know
how to live like people, and had not managed to differentiate themselves from
the animals."37 Deustua was not alone in this view, which was expressed in the
pages of El Comercio and other prominent publications as well as in congres-
sional debates.
Before r895, then, local elites had control over educational administration,
including both spending and taxation.J 8 Because internal taxation, to the extent
that it survived the guano boom, consisted largely of direct taxes imposed on
businesses and commerce, its incidence fell squarely on local elites. This group,
uuwilling to pay taxes for services they did not valne, chose instead not to build
primary schools. As a result, schooliug stagnated, particularly in the interior of
the country, in regions with large indigenous populations.
This pattern appears consistent with arguments advanced by economic his-
torians that attribute low educational development to the high social inequal-
ity associated with large indigenous populations. Mariscal and Sokoloff as
well as Engerman and Sokoloff, in explaining cross-national patterns of educa-
tional development in the Americas, argue that where the indigenous and black
population was large, social and economic inequality was high.39 To preserve
their standing, and to prevent the introduction of redistributive policies, elites
in these societies designed particularly restrictive political institutions. These
institutions created a climate far from propitious for the approval of policies
of educational development, which was seen as a redistributive measure that
taxed politically powerful elites without providing them any benefits. Thus,
social and economic inequality led to an unwillingness by political leaders to
build systems of national education.
But there are several problems with this argument. 4o First, as Mahoney points
out, this account is not very precise about what it means by "institutions."4I
Second, if it refers to formal political institutions, it cannot account for the
variation in educational development across Peru's districts, all of which were
l1 Excerpted in Montero, La Escuela Rural, 8 5-87.
JS This is a bit of an oversimplification, because the district-level taxes that were earmarked to
fund education still had to be approved by the national government.
39 Elisa Mariscal and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, "Schooling, Suffrage, and the Persistence of Inequality
in the Americas, I 8oo- I 94 5," in Political Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America,
ed. Stephen Haber (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000); Stanley L. Engerman and
Kenneth L. Sokoloff, "Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Differential Patterns of Growth
among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States," in How
Latin America Fell Behind, ed. Stephen Haber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
~o I have argued elsewhere that there are reasons to doubt the utility of this argument.in explain-
ing variation in educational development at the cross-national level, because it ignores the role
of Liberal political elites and autonomous state officials in educational development in coun-
tries like Chile. See Hillel David Soifer, "The Sources of Infrastructucal Power: Evidence from
Nineteenth-Century Chilean Education," Latin American Research Review 44, no. 2 (2009):
158-r8o.
4 1 James Mahoney, Colonialism and Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20IO).
Educational Development in Peru
governed by identical structures of formal political institutions. Third, and
most importantly, this line of argument cannot explain the change in educa-
tional development produced by the Civilista governments of the Aristocratic
Republic. Rather than being doomed to educational stagnation because of
its ethnic diversity, a comparison of education policy before and after r895
reveals that educational development failed in Peru when it was left in the
hands of local elites. The Civilista governments after r895 learned this lesson
and sought to seize hold of the implementation of policy. This centralization,
although it had its limits, altered the trajectory of Peruvian education, showing
that the institutions of administration are a crucial factor_, in state building.
THE EXTENT AND LIMITS OF EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
UNDER THE CIVILISTAS
By contrast to the earlier stagnation of educational development revealed in
the censo, primary schooling grew sharply during the Aristocratic Republic,
and it became far more systematized. Strikingly, this development coincided
with restrictions of the suffrage and with growing economic inequality - both
of which go against the predictions of the Sokoloff/Engerman/Mariscal argu-
ment. This section begins by describing the transformation of education during
the Aristocratic Republic, relying chiefly on the accounts of primary schooling
in the Memorias of the Education Ministry and other government documents.
In the remainder of the chapter, I turn to the opposition of rural elites, partic-
ularly in the highlands, to educational development, and I show that the pro-
gress made under the Civilistas was carried out in the face of their resistance.
I close by briefly tracing the decline of the Civilista educational project, which
resulted both from the fragmentation of their coalition and from retreat and
compromise with rural elites.
To assess the power of the state in the education realm, we can begin with
evidence about the provision of schooling. Significant gains were made uuder
the Civilistas. In terms of provision, between r897 and r920, the number of
primary schools nearly quadrupled- from 852 to 3,338- and the vast major-
ity of the new schools were public. This growth (and that of attendance, which
doubled) far outpaced the growth of population. This increased provision of
schools included construction in formerly underserved areas such as the high-
lands areas where the absence of education was revealed by the I 902 census. In
fact, school provision per capita actually declined in Lima during the Civilista
era, while it increased in the rest of the country.
From r897 to 1921, school provision grew everywhere in Peru. The num-
ber of schools more than doubled in Ancash, Cajamarca, Junin, and Cuzco,
doubled in Arequipa, nearly tripled in Ayacucho and Puna, quadrupled in
Amazonas, and rose more than 8oo percent in Huancavelica, 700 percent
in Loreto, and sao percent in Hu:inuco. Ifi every department in Peru except
Callao, the number of schools increased sharply, more than doubling in fifteen
of the twenty-three departments. This was a striking change from the guano
 Hillel D. Soifer
era, when school provision grew sharply in Lima while declining in the rest
of the country. And this growth was not limited to the departmental capi-
tals: whereas (as cited earlier in this chapter) in I897 only eight provinces had
more than one school per one thousand school-age residents, by I92I, after
two decades of centralized administration, only eight provinces had school
provision rates of less than one school per one thousand school-age residents.
The increased provision of schools, in other words, benefited the population
nationwide.
Gains in the systematization and control of primary schooling also reflect
state building. We can examine the areas of teacher training, textbook and cur-
riculum standardization, and the development- for the first time- of an inspec-
tion system for primary schools that did not rely on self-reporting by teachers
themselves. Progress on these fronts was uneven, but the overall record shows
a significant change from the stagnation of the pre-I89 5 era.
There was moderate improvement in the quality of teachers after I895·
An escuela normal for men was opened in Lima in I 90 5 (for the first time
since before the War of the Pacific), and by I909, forty-nine graduates of this
two-year course in teacher training were serving in public schools. By 1915,
several other normal schools had opened, and the minister of Education, in his
annual Memoria, cited the improvement in teacher quality as an achievement
of recent years.<• Yet the majority of teachers continued to lack basic pedagogi-
cal training, or more than a primary school education- in 1916, about II per-
cent were normal school graduates." This continued to limit the development
of systematic primary schooling - particularly in parts of the country where
teacher salaries were low.44 Efforts were made to reach noncertified teachers
with pedagogical techniques through other means; notably, a journal of pri-
mary education called La Educaci6n Nacional was created in 1902. 45
More progress can be seen in the standardization of texts and curricula. A
first step took place already in I 89 5, when for the first time, the national gov-
ernment asserted the right to approve all texts used in primary schools. To be
approved, texts had to use the metric system, use Peruvian examples wherever
possible, and use maps that reflected the country's international claims.<' The
dizzying number of texts that were approved in subsequent years in each sub-
ject suggests that these requirements were easy to meet, reflected little on the
content of texts, and set no bounds on the character of education.
Textbook standardization began in earnest under the Pardo administration.
Contests were opened in May I905 to write a "truly Peruvian" reader for pri-
mary school students as well as other early childhood texts." By I907, more
4~ MIP 1915, xviii.
41 MIP 1917, Torno r, x:x:xvi.
~4 On variation in teacher salaries, see MIP 1903,396. On the difficulties teachers faced in getting
paid, see MIP r9o6, xxxii.
-u MIP 1902, 243££.
46
MIP I897. 27ff.
u MIP 1905, xlvi, 877-878,904££.
Educational Development in Peru
than I5o,ooo copies of the reader, as well as nearly 58,ooo first-year readers
and more than 27,ooo second-year readers had been printed, while texts for
upper years of primary school appeared more slowly.<' By I9I6, the use of tbis
primary school reader was mandatory in all public schools."
In addition to these readers, the government undertook to distribute a wide
variety of texts to schools throughout the country. Textbooks were distrib-
uted in significant numbers to every department in the country - although the
rate of textbook provision varied widely, with higher rates in departments that
contained the important urban centers of Arequipa, Cuzco, Lima, and Callao,
and in the mining regions of the central highlands. By conqast, textbook pro-
vision was well below tbe national average in the departments of the heavily
indigenous southern highlands, which shows the continued uneven reach of
the state. The national average in I909 of 22.8 textbooks per I,ooo residents
suggests that textbook distribution was far from sufficient to meet the needs of
the school-age population, or even of the smaller number of Peruvians enrolled
in schools. In addition to textbooks, the government distributed four thousand
political and physical maps of Peru to primary schools.l 0 It was also invested
in distributing pamphlets warning against the threat of alcoholism, a subject
matter addressed in the fourth and fifth years of primary school. In I9I7, the
government contracted with a professor at the Universidad San Marcos to
write a national history textbook, saying that history was one of tbe most
efficient ways to "raise the character and form the national spirit of Peruvian
citizens." 5I
Although the distribution of official textbooks reached more children as these
decades went on, it was far from sufficient to shape the content of learning for
students throughout the country. In this facet of educational development, as in
the others, the progress made during the Aristocratic Republic was significant
but limited. The same can be said about the rise of school inspection - which,
by providing information on the state of schools, underlies and reinforces other
aspects of efforts at centralization. "By I907, Peru had a regimented inspection
system for the first time. Inspectors at the district, province, and department
level reported to four visitadores, each in charge of one-quarter of the coun-
try. Inspectors assessed the relationship berw-een teachers and local authorities,
collected statistics, observed classes, and conducted examinations of students
to see whether the standard curriculum was being effectively taught.'" In I9o8,
forms were created for inspectors to fill out in order to standardize the infor-
mation collected in their reports.
At the district level, inspectors ·continued to be selected from the communi-
ties they oversaw, although there were restrictions on what other jobs they
~s MIP 1906, x:x:xii; MIP 1907, 644-649.
49 MIP I9I6, v. 3. 4BE.
so MIP I9I9, XX.
ST MIP 1917, xxvii.
sz MIP r9o7,xix, 585-589,591-599.
 Hillel D. Soifer
could hold. At the higher levels, however, there was a marked shift from ear-
lier iterations of educational oversight: provincial and departmental inspectors
were part of the professional education bureaucracy. The reports they filed
(every fifteen days, according to the new inspection law) were highly critical of
local conditions.B In 1919, provincial inspectors began to be rotated on a regu-
lar basis, a further step in the construction of a system of educational oversight
independent of local elites.
THE RISE AND EROSION OF ADMINISTRATIVE CENTRALIZATION
The r902 census provides statistical support for the claim that before the
Aristocratic Republic local elites played a central role in determining the fate
of educational development. Extensive anecdotal evidence, of which examples
were described earlier in this chapter, reveals that they were indifferent if not
hostile to building public primary schools. They remained so thereafter, and yet
education, as described earlier, developed. This reveals that the ability of local
elites to stymie educational development depends on the institutions of educa-
tion policy, and thus that we need to look at those institutions and not just the
preferences structured by social inequality to explain educational outcomes.
Before r895, Peru's administrative design allowed local elites to control the
fate of schools. Relevant positions in the peripheral bureaucracy - teachers,
inspectors, tax collectors, and so on - were filled with local elites, who took
advantage of tbe lack of central government sanction to erode efforts emanat-
ing from Lima to build schools. The r873 decentralization further reinforced
this pattern: it placed even more aspects of education administration in the
hands of local elites who controlled municipal government. Thus the limits of
Peruvian education found earlier in this chapter result from the unwillingness
of local elites to collaborate in a project of educational development.
Under the Civilistas, as already described, significant gains in education
were made. These gains resulted directly from the weakening of the hold of
local elites over education. The attitudes of those elites, as we shall see, did
not change. Nor did elites become weaker: indeed the Aristocratic Republic
marked the rise of the gamonales, or rural strongmen. But they had only lim-
ited success after 1895 in acting on their anti-education preferences because
they lost direct influence over education policy. This reflected the fiscal and
administrative centralization of education, which took it out of local hands
that were unwilling to contribute to its development. Institutions mediate, in
other words, the effects of social inequality and elite preferences on educa-
tional outcomes.
The move to eliminate local influence gained greater momentum after the
r902 censo. The r905 Memoria del Ministerio de ]usticia, Culto, e Instrucci6n
Publica (MIP) saw a critique of local administration of schools by the minister
of Education. He charged them with failure to keep financial records (only 3 3
n MIP r 9 ro, v. 2, 3sff.
Educational Development in Peru
of 99 provinces turned in education budgets in r9o5) and meet their obliga-
tions (of these 33, r2 owed more than half of teacher salaries for the year), and
he blamed them for the 2oo,ooo unenrolled school-age children. This was part
of a campaign to convince Congress and the president to grant the national
bureaucracy control over schools; a change that the minister felt would lead
to dramatic improvements in the quality and provision of education. In 1906,
education was placed directly under the supervision of the executive, and in
1909, the Direcci6n General de Instrucci6n Publica took full charge of all
aspects of education in the country.
Civilista reformers in the national bureaucracy were n~mmitted to building
a national primary school system in Peru, and they were willing to impose that
system against the wishes of the country's highland elites. They saw school-
ing as a crucial component of their efforts to bring progress and development
by extending "the presence of the state to the length and breadth of its rural
society." H State officials were committed to education as an avenue toward the
"civilization" and "incorporation" of the indigenous population, their assimi-
lation into a Peruvian national community. 55
Even as the Liberal project took hold in Lima, local elites, especially in the
highlands, remained hostile to educational development. They saw the Civilista
reforms as "subversive modernization."s 6 Education was seen as a threat to
their political and economic hegemony over the indigenous population." To
the extent that they could, the highland provincial elite tried to undermine
educational development in a variety of ways.'' The "lack of will to implement
reforms" on the part of local elites in administrative positions tempered the
positive effects of administrative and fiscal centralization of education.59 Active
resistance, too, erupted at times: Hazen cites "dynamite bombings" targeted
against reformist officials in Puna, as well as the burning of schools and impris-
onment of teachers and those who dared to enroll in school. 60
Because the Civilista state relied less on local elites in the highlands, their
opposition was an obstacle that could be gradually overcome. 6 ' So long as
the exports that funded the state-building effort continued to boom, and the
Civilista political coalition remained broad, the resistance of local elites could
slow but not end educational development. But the state would come to need
these elites as it faced a massive wave of revolts in the southern highlands
H MIP I 90S, xl, 893ff.
n Carlos Contreras and Marcos Cueto,Historia del PerU Contemporaneo (Lima: IEP, 1999), 2I8;
Carlos Contreras, Maestros, Mistis ji Campesinos en el PerU rural del siglo XX {Lima: IEP,
1996), 9, Documento de Trabajo #So.
' 6 Nils Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano I780-I9JO (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 212.
57 Dan C. Hazen, "The Politics of Schooling in the Nonliterate Third World: The Case of Highland
Peru," History of Education Quarterly rS, no. 4 (Winter 1978), 428.
s8 Malaga in Montero, La Escuela Rural; Contreras, Maestros, I?; MIP 1915, xx.
59 Muecke, Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru, I8r.
60 Hazen, "The Politics of Schooling," 428-429.
6
T Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition.
266 Hillel D. Soifer
between 1915 and 1924. Keeping "order in the provinces" was beyond the
capacity of even a newly strengthened central state 6 ' Turmoil was particularly
great in the southern highland provinces of Arequipa, Puno, and Cuzco. These
three departments were the epicenter of unrest: Hazen shows that nearly every
province in Puna and Cuzco saw rebellions between 1920 and 1923,63 and
Flores Galindo counts I37 peasant revolts in Puna alone between I90I and
I920. 6' The most severe of these was the Rumi Maqui rebellion, which swept
Puna beginning in 1915, lasting more than a year. 6s Unrest in Puno continued
through the next decade as well. 66 Moreover, the central state's coercive capac-
ity here- as elsewhere in the country- was still quite limited. Data from I9I8
show only 4 37 police were stationed in the department of Arequipa, 3 I 8 in
Cuzco, and 231 in Puno. In these departments and indeed nationwide, the
number of police was no higher at this point than it had been in I 872. ''
As the specter of rural unrest loomed around 1915, state administration in
the highlands reconstructed closer ties with local elites. At the same time, the
efforts from the central state bureaucracy to continue the progress of primary
education began to erode. The Memorias returned to their nineteenth-century
focus on policy design and no longer focused on the shortcomings of imple-
mentation. A harbinger of this can be seen in I9IO, when inspectors were
urged to stick to the facts rather than currying favor by overstating the prob-
lems they observed." In r9r5, the minister called for the decentralization of
education and backed away from efforts to homogenize education across the
whole country in favor of division into regional zonas escolares that included
departments "with analogous climactic and sociological conditions." 69 In I 917,
school inspection was removed from the portfolio of the national education
ministry and turned over to the municipalities, despite ministerial opposition.7°
These contemporaneous shifts were no coincidence: as unrest rose, the Civilista
state sacrificed educational centralization on the altar of social stability in the
highlands. It ceded control of education and other elements of modernization
because it needed elite allies to respond to this wave of revolts.
These first signs of retreat from the project of educational systematization
and development were compounded with the collapse of the Civilista coalition.
A central element in this political reorganization was the rise of urban labor
62
Peter F. Klaren, Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 206.
63 Dan C. Hazen, The Awakening ofPuno: Government Policy and the Indian Problem in Southern
Peru (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1974).
6
4 Excerpted in Wilfreda Kapsoli, Los Movimientos Campesinos en el PerU IB79-I965 (L1ma:
Delva Editores, 1977), 217.
6
S Jose Luis Renique, La Batalla par Puna: Conflicto Agrario y Nacion en los Andes Peruanas
(Lima: IEP, 2004).
66
Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, 32o-32I.
6
7 Soifer, Authority Over Distance, chap. 5·
6
~ MIP 1910, Torno 2, 35ff.
69
MIP 1915, 477·
7o MIP 1917, xxxviii.
Educational Development in Peru
protest, which put the social question firmly in the center of the political arena
and led to the rise of electoral challengers to the Civilistas. As social unrest
grew, Augusto Leguia seized power in a coup and shifted away from a Liberal
state-building project toward a more populist program designed to appeal to
the urban lower classes. This brought the Liberal era to an end, and efforts to
increase primary school enrollment and systematization slid down the list of
the priorities of state leaders during the succeeding Oncenio.
CONCLUSION: STATE BUILDING, CENTRALIZATION,
AND LOCAL ELITE INFLUENCE
The gains achieved during the Aristocratic Republic reveal that even in Peru,
Liberal reformers were able to achieve some lasting, if limited, results. Education
grew when three conditions aligned: a commitment by central elites, centralized
control over education at the national level, and reliance on deployed bureau-
crats rather than local elites. A combination of these three conditions allowed
reformers to act for a time on their desire to educate the population. Although
liberal reforms faced an uphill battle due to elite resistance, and although the
liberal coalition fragmented before reforms were consolidated, the experience
of these decades stands out in contrast to both earlier and subsequent periods in
Peruvian history. The experience of the Aristocratic Republic reveals that insti-
tutions mediate the effects of social inequality and elite preferences, and that if
local bureaucracies are autonomous from local social structures, they are more
responsive to state-building edicts emanating from their superiors. Institutions,
and not ethnic diversity, underlay the failure of educational development
revealed in the I 902 census. The gains in the decades thereafter, which stand in
sharp contrast to the broader record of Peruvian schooling, show the primacy of
administrative institutions in determining the fate of liberal state building.
In the Aristocratic Republic, centralization and state building went hand
in hand. Yet state leaders had concerns far beyond educational development,
which led them to cede ground on this aspect of state building in favor of social
stability, which was threatened by highland revolts after I9I5. This sacrifice
of "progress" on the altar of "order" has echoes far beyond the case of Peru;
the need to compromise with powerful social actors commonly crops up as a
limitation on state building. The resulting retreat from state-building efforts
leave as legacies not only limited educational development in Peru but also
the Jim Crow laws in the southern states after the retreat from Reconstruction
by Republicans in the post-Civil War United States.'' This highlights the fact
that state building depends on both elite commitment and institutional design.
To understand efforts to extend the reach of the state, and their success and
failure, attention to the relationship between the state and local power holders
is crucial.
7' Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in the United States
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).