Educational Background on the Island of Gran Canaria

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND ON THE ISLAND OF GRAN CANARIA In islands where the dominant social tasks were those carried out by farmers, day laborers, artisans and servants, as well as those employed with military privileges,2 the learning of reading and writing must not have been widely recognized or apparently very useful. The Island of the Canary Islands, as the Island of Gran Canaria was called since ancient times, was a clear example of this almost generalized lack of concern for tasks related to education, instruction or simply the learning of subjects, as happened in all societies during the long period that the Ancien Régime lasted. Only the work carried out by the religious orders mitigated, in part, the aftermath of cerebral famines, with the pernicious consequences of servile memory and falsehoods that this brought with it, by understanding education as the purification of corrupted and beleaguered souls, for the sake of weak and outdated bodies deeply subjected to the emerging passions of evil.3 Without going too far back in time so as not to leave the established chronological margins, We could affirm that one of the first schools to be created in the city of Las Palmas, with a certain systematicity and rigor in its studies, was the one instituted by the Society of Jesus. The inquisitor and canon of the Cathedral Church, Andrés Romero y Suárez, in a public deed of May 15, 1696 and in others that followed,4 offered 200 ducats for life, a hacienda of 380 fanegas with fig trees included in Jinámar and the houses he owned, on the condition that the Jesuits teach the first letters to the locals. And so it was, because on January 1 of the following year, and "with the unspeakable joy of the founder" according to Viera y Clavijo himself, the classes of Grammar and first letters were opened. This school continued until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, although it took two years for the Council of Castile to issue a Royal Order creating two free schools of first letters (also called royal and a little later public) in the Vegueta and Triana districts of the city. According to the documentation consulted, they were under the supervision of the regent of the Audiencia and had been endowed with funds from the old legacy of the inquisitor Romero Suárez, in addition to 40 pesos for the rent of the house and 5 reales de vellón a month from the wealthiest parents "to reward the arduous work of teaching and in response to the increase in the price of all the basic necessities". 5 Apparently, although it is perhaps too much to assume, while the teacher from Vegueta remained faithful to the scholastic ideas of the time, the teacher from Triana adapted to the emerging preEnlightenment current to the point of promoting the entry of Jansenism into his school as a basis for improving the educational work.6 In any case, let us not be deceived, In addition to learning to read and write in them, as A. Millares Torres rightly points out, the study techniques and methodologies left much to be desired in either of the two schools in the capital, according to the eloquent testimonies given by Domingo José Navarro, in which he expressed, helpless and disappointed, that "school hours were a hell of groans, cries and cries.7 In the rest of the island, things were even worse in terms of the difficulties encountered in creating and consolidating some kind of educational establishment. In fact, the only town that at the beginning of the century had a minimally equipped school was Telde. As a foundation, it was opened in 1737 by Pedro Manrique Alvarado with a wealth from Diego López Montañer; For its operation, the teacher was granted a house with a room for teaching and 160 pesos per year from the product of various lands and waters: According to this foundation, [the teacher] is obliged to teach in the usual hours of morning and afternoon, not only the First Letters, up to writing and counting, but also Latinity. At present he has no disciples dedicated to the latter study: there are twenty of those in First Letters. This school is in need of a lot of renovation. To this end it seems expedient to declare the said Master exonerated from the office of Latinity, and even to forbid him to teach it voluntarily during the hours of School, in which he must employ all the present time of morning and evening, obliging him to its punctual observance and to follow the convenient method of teaching dictated to him. in addition to the numerous parochial and conventual schools scattered throughout the rest of the municipalities and established since the times of the conquest, or the chaplaincies, as happened in the case of Agüimes where it was founded by the Chantre of the cathedral of Caracas from 1748 "with the charge of teaching the first letters in the morning and afternoon, for which he calls his nearest relatives, and failing that, the native of that town who was poorer",9 were the most prominent redoubts for teaching reading, writing, accounts and, above all, the absolute and unquestionable truths contained in Christian doctrine. Let us bear in mind that the population of the island at the end of the eighteenth century was 49,445 people, as shown by the census of Floridablanca; Of these, almost 10,000 had not reached the age of 16 and, however, only 153 were counted as students (which represented 0.3%). It is more curious to see that in none of the jobs described did the profession of teacher of first letters, friend or preceptor of Grammar appear.10 The foundations were laid, therefore, to immediately promote the studies that the island required through the general policies and particular strategies designed by the RSEAP, in accordance with the political demands and the economic and social conditions that were coming. In addition to trying to put an end to "inert" (sic) knowledge – an objective that was far from being put into practice and being real – its members would try to outline some aspects in relation to the contents, method, order and organization of the most useful and beneficial knowledge.