Higher-education mishaps

The beginnings of higher education and vocational education in the former colonies

Universities were nonexistent in Portuguese America throughout the entire colonial period. Conversely, in Spanish possessions, the first universities were founded in the 1550s in Mexico and Peru. Maria Ligia Prado, a historian at USP, says the absence of universities in Portuguese America was a direct reflection of the circumstances back in the colony’s motherland. Seventeenthcentury Spain, then a powerful European empire, had more than 20 universities. Portugal, in contrast, was a small, impoverished nation with a single university to call its own, the University of Coimbra. The Spanish had a large contingent of faculty, some of whom were willing to transfer to the New World. “The colonies were different because their colonizers were different,” she explains.

After Brazil’s Independence, higher education was slow to develop despite advocacy for expansion. When the Portuguese court transferred to Brazil in 1808, a primary education system was created in which teachers taught individual subjects independently. Little by little, courses such as those administered at the School of Anatomy, Surgery, and Medicine in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador were integrated into medical schools in Rio de Janeiro State and Bahia (1832). Law schools were founded in São Paulo and Olinda (1827). Engineering schools, such as the Rio de Janeiro Polytechnic School (1874) and the Ouro Preto School of Mining (1876), were eventually founded. Brazil’s first university—the University of Rio de Janeiro—would only be founded in 1920 and later renamed first the University of Brazil and now the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

During the colonial period, children born to wealthy families typically pursued advanced degrees at the University of Coimbra. In Spanish America, in contrast, independence movements had large numbers of alumni from local universities, notably Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala and Universidad de Chuquisaca in Bolivia.

“Universities in Spanish America were conservative and primarily designed to train civil servants for colonial government positions. But they, too, were influenced by the effervescence that marked the late eighteenth century. Mariano Moreno [1778–1811], who led the movement for independence of the United Provinces of Río de la Plata, had graduated from Chuquisaca,” notes USP historian Maria Ligia Prado.

Curiously, however, rather than expanding universities in Spanish America, the leaders of newly independent nations were determined to shut them down. “To liberals in [South] America, universities carried the stain of their colonial past,” explains Prado, who explored the events of this period in an essay titled “Universidade, estado e igreja na América Latina” (Universities, the State and the Church in Latin America), published in the book América Latina no século XIX. Tramas, telas e textos (Latin America in the nineteenth century: Stories, paintings, and texts; EDUSP, 2004).

Newly formed nations instead wanted to create a higher education system designed for more practical purposes.

“This was the model that Brazil would embrace in the nineteenth century: universities were intended primarily to develop professional skills,” says Prado. In this context, it was not the absence of universities in Imperial Brazil that caused the country to lag behind its neighboring nations, but the length of time it took to eventually develop higher education programs and schools.