Education in northern Peru. The first viceregal college and the first republican university in Latin America.

Abstract

The article is the result of a documentary analysis research whose purpose is to present the evolution of education in northern Peru, from 1556 to the Pacific War, highlighting the founding of the first viceroyalty college and the first republican university in Latin America, marked by brio and rebuffs. As a result, the first college was founded in Trujillo in 1556 by Viceroy Andres Hurtado de Mendoza, which was closed by Viceroy Toledo. The colonial authorities were not present again in the foundation of schools until 1821. The Seminary of San Carlos and San Marcelo was founded in 1625 by Bishop Carlos Marcelo Corne and the College of El Salvador in 1627 by the Jesuits, who monopolized higher education in the extensive northern region of the viceroyalty. Then, the access to education in these establishments only favored a privileged class, leaving without option the indigenous majorities and women; therefore, it had an openly elitist and discriminatory character. Only the Conciliar Seminary arrived at the end of the colony and at the beginning of the Republic, the University of Trujillo was founded by the Liberator Simón Bolívar with his general minister José Faustino Sánchez Carrión. The republican education was asystematic until the Regulations of Instruction of 1850 and 1855 promulgated by President Ramón Castilla that ordered it and put it on track, but it stagnated in 1879.