Educando a Costa Rica: Alfabetizacion popular, formacion docente y genero (1880-1950) (review)

Educando a Costa Rica: Alfabetización popular, formación docente y género (1880-1950). By Iván Molina and Steven Palmer. Colección Ciencias Sociales. San José: Editorial Porvenir, 2000. Photographs. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. 180 pp. Paper.

Education in Costa Rica is an important topic with an impressive historiography. Educando a Costa Rica is a small book of only four chapters that challenges the existing literature and suggests new approaches. The aim of the authors is to put the spotlight on popular education and the cultural context of education as opposed to the traditional focus on institutional and political history. Only in the epilogue do the authors revisit the old debate over the role of education in making Costa Rica a democratic nation.

Each of the four studies is separate and independent. The first, by Molina Jiménez, is based on literacy statistics in Costa Rica and Nicaragua from 1880 to 1950 and analyzes regional, rural-urban, gender, and age differences. Among the interesting revelations is that literacy went down from 40.5 percent to 37.4 percent in Nicaragua from 1920 to 1950, but in Costa Rica literacy increased from 65.7 percent to 78.8 percent during the same period. While the comparison of the two situations is useful and revealing, there is of course danger in accepting census figures on literacy. A casual, concluding comment about the success the literacy crusade in Nicaragua had in achieving a literacy figure in 1983 of 87.1 percent, a figure that is not supported by any serious study of the literacy crusade, reveals the danger. In the second study, which was previously published in English in the HAHR, Steven Palmer and Gladys Rojas Chaves examine the role of the Colegio de Señoritas in the birth of feminism in Costa Rica. They also discuss the role of female students in protests against the Federico Tinoco dictatorship in the 1917-19 period. Molina Jiménez's study focuses on the increasing dominance of women in the teaching work force in the early twentieth century. Based largely on an extensive government report on the state of the teaching profession in Costa Rica in 1904, it touches on other social and pedagogical issues, such as the difference between rural and urban schools. The fourth chapter, by Steven Palmer, treats the Rockefeller Foundation's campaign against ancylostomiasis, a Central America-wide campaign that began in Costa Rica in 1915. Among the issues raised are Costa Rican suspicion of imperialism and the role of the Costa Rican elite in utilizing the Rockefeller campaign to promote "auto-immigration," that is, improving the health of Costa Rican workers so that darker-skinned immigrants would not be needed. Palmer's study reveals both the sophistication of prior Central American studies of the disease, largely unknown to scientists from the United States, and the important role of Costa Rica's educational infrastructure in the campaign.

Educando a Costa Ricais by no means an introduction to Costa Rican education and it might have been more generous to previous pioneering studies. Nevertheless, the four separate studies are well-documented contributions to the understanding of Costa Rica, and they succeed in pointing to opportunities of applying the study of popular culture to a familiar topic and suggesting new, comparative approaches. The book, which will delight readers who already know Costa Rican history for the apt selection of commentaries by well-known figures, such as Clodomiro Picado, Carlos Gagini, and Teodoro Picado Michalski, strengthens the well-established place of Molina Jiménez and Palmer in the field of the history of popular culture in Central America. As for the democracy debate, far from breaking new ground, they merely suggest that further, similar studies may reveal new understanding of Costa Rican democracy.