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Technology and Culture 42.1 (2001) 163-165



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Book Review

Dreams of Development: Colombia's National School of Mines and Its Engineers, 1887-1970


Dreams of Development: Colombia's National School of Mines and Its Engineers, 1887-1970. By Pamela S. Murray. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Pp. xiv+154. $24.95

When I started reading this study offering "a new angle on questions about the links among higher education, society, and development in Latin America" (p. ix), I wondered why I had been asked to review it. My expertise is in the history of mining education and mining. Much of Pamela Murray's book is about the economic development of Colombia and its relationship to class structure. But it is about more than that: it also covers topics that will interest historians of mining and engineering education. The Escuela de Minas played a role in bringing to Colombian education styles and societal values differing from those of sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal. This examination of mining education thus provides an [End Page 163] informative local study of issues surrounding modernization, secularization, the spread of the "scientific" worldview and positivism, and the role of military interests in Colombia.

What will most interest readers of Technology and Culture, however, are two chapters in particular. In chapter four, titled "Engineers, State, and Society," Murray discusses the role alumni of the Escuela des Minas played in the rise of Colombian industry, especially textile factories and other manufacturing. As with graduates of mining engineering schools in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, many graduates did little mining, instead taking engineering methods into other fields. As with graduates from the Colorado School of Mines, most became lower-level technical and administrative experts rather than executives or entrepreneurs. The Escuela provided an avenue by means of which members of the country's rising middle sector could move upward, using the old-boy network to make suitable marriages or business partnerships.

The other chapter that will interest T&C readers, "Feminizing the Fraternity," illustrates another similarity between mining education in Colombia and the United States: women's participation in engineering. Murray sets the context by describing how women were moving into professions previously defined as male domains, such as dentistry, medicine, and pharmacy. What is surprising is that the entry of women into mining engineering in Colombia roughly parallels that of women in the United States. The Colorado School of Mines graduated five women before 1969, after which the number of graduates grew to about 20 percent in the late twentieth century. Similarly, Colombia graduated its fourth woman engineer in 1965 and by 1979 almost 20 percent of the graduates were women.

The admission of women to the engineering school occurred during a period of general economic growth, as in the United States. One difference between the two countries may be the importance of private, religiously run, all-girl secondary education. Although I know of no study of high school education for women engineers, research on women in science suggests that such a study might show a preponderance of single-sex schools, religious or otherwise. Colombian women engineers have apparently had more success in the public sector than private sector--again mirroring the experience of American women engineers--and yet 46 percent of women graduates do work in the private sector.

The book ends with a discussion of Colombia's population explosion in the mid-twentieth century and the expansion and modernization of the Facultad de Minas in the 1960s. New schools competed with the Facultad and provided new services. The older institution struggled to change, pulled between new historical realities and entrenched interests, again like some of its American counterparts. Overall, what surprised me most were the similarities between the history of engineering education in Colombia [End Page 164] and the United States, notwithstanding their different historical, educational, and technological traditions.

Kathleen Ochs



Dr. Ochs is associate professor of the history of science and technology at the Colorado School of Mines. Her current...

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