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99 Chapter 3 Education, Republican Values, and Intellectual Independence Do not be concerned about America: there is no better academy for the public than a revolution. (No tenga V. pues, cuidado por la América, no hay mejor academia para el pueblo que una revolución.) —Carta del Dr. D. Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra al Español sobre su número 19 (1821) While any examination of Rodríguez’s ecological thought presupposes a critical recovery of his most neglected texts, a reference to the Caraqueño’s thoughts on education demands a shift in the direction of the Rodríguez remembered popularly in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and recently recovered by the government itself. Bequeathed the honorary title Maestro del Libertador (the Liberator’s teacher), Simón Rodríguez haunts the contemporary Venezuelan landscape as a spectre of revolutionary conscience, of the nation’s social obligation to its youth. Recent publications such as Eduardo Morales Gil’s Simón Rodríguez and Simón Bolívar, Pioneers of Popular Education: Origins of the Bolivarian Schools (Simón Rodríguez y Simón Bolívar, pioneros de la educación popular: Orígenes de las Escuelas Bolivarianas) (Caracas, 2006) and Luis Gerardo González Briceño’s Simón Rodríguez: Political and Pedagogical Beliefs (Simón Rodríguez: Ideario pedagógico y político) (Caracas, 2005) tie Rodríguez to his famous pupil as well as to reforms now under way with the support of the government of Hugo Chávez. Morales Gil emphasizes the connections between that famous pupil 100 Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar and his teacher, noting that the bulk of Bolívar’s writings on education (his exact figure is 71 percent) date from the four-year period (1825–1828) “in which he was in contact with the enlightened Caraqueñan pedagogue”(en los cuales estuvo en contacto con el ilustrado pedagogo caraqueño) (154). Naming Rodríguez as one of the intellectual and moral influences responsible for Bolívar’s postwar interest in education, the author paints the two thinkers as proponents of a project whose completion remained suspended in the wake of Bolívar’s death and Rodríguez’s departure from the public stage. Now, his argument goes, has come the time “to pay off a historic debt contracted almost two centuries ago”(saldar una deuda histórica contraída desde hace dos siglos) and the current Venezuelan government accordingly takes on the role of realizing a lost dream, “the project of redemption of the excluded of America, using education as a tool for social change” (el proyecto de redención de los excluídos de América, utilizando a la educación como herramienta de cambio social) (206). Among its other features, Morales Gil’s approach tends to dehistoricize Rodríguez and Bolívar—the latter’s death is referred to as a “physical disappearance” (desaparición física), a construction that presumes an extraphysical presence —and to cast contemporary politics into revolutionary relief. Finally, the reference to America invokes the extranational sense of revolutionary project common to the thinkers of Rodríguez and Bolívar’s time. González Briceño’s book performs a similar operation, reifying rather than demystifying the saintly revolutionary leaders, but it aims at a younger audience and offers Bolívar’s and Rodríguez’s own words as the bulk of its text. Each chapter begins with a citation from the pupil alluding to a particular “problem,” “answered” by a list of related quotes from Rodríguez’s written oeuvre. Interspersed are drawings in which a Rodríguez in contemporary garb (even, in one case, a baseball cap) but still sporting nineteenth -century eyeglasses high-fives a Venezuelan youth or sheds a tear above headlines referring to the petroleum workers’ strike in opposition to the Chávez government.This Rodríguez is doubly dehistoricized, not only in visual terms, but also through the list of quotes, which takes his words out of their original textual habitat to create a collection of powerful and ambiguous sound bites endowed with the almost divine authority of Venezuela ’s more famous Simón. Despite their differing focus and imagined audiences, Morales Gil and González Briceño converge on the notion of independence as an unfinished project, a vision that depends on the broadest possible interpretation of the word. Their “independence,” like that championed by Simón Rodríguez, signifies...

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