'School Reform and Nation-Building from Varela to Batlle: Uruguay as a Crossroad of Ideas in the River Plate, 1868-1915'

The proposed fellowship would help me complete a 110,000 word monograph 'School Reform and Nation-Building from Varela to Batlle: Uruguay as a Crossroad of Ideas in the River Plate, 1868-1915.' Together with a number of articles, it will represent both a further development from my research on Brazil's 'national reconstruction', which led to four monographs, and the foundation of a larger project on frontier modernisation in Latin America. My intimate knowledge of Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, which forms part of the River Plate region and established a developmental and educational dictatorship modelled after Auguste Comte's positivist design, provide a solid basis for exploring ideas and institutions that guided state- and nation-building in other frontier regions.

Uruguay's 1904 pacification and ensuing transformation has always fascinated students of Latin America and beyond. The River Plate state became the first in the region to establish a liberal democracy with stable representative institutions and women's suffrage; largely nationalised public services and protected key industries; a cradle-to-grave welfare system; complete secularisation; and free education at all levels. Despite the backlash from the 1960s to 1980s, Uruguay today still ranks third in the U.N.'s Human Development Index for Latin America which measures the per-capita gross domestic product and factors like longevity and access to education. The initiation of this progressive course is attributed to José Batlle y Ordóñez's administrations (1903-7, 1911-15) and those who followed him, the batllistas. The President's shadow still looms over the country, comparable only to Getúlio Vargas in Brazil or Franklin D. Roosevelt in the U.S.

Starting with Arturo Ardao's revisionist theses, formulated in the 1950s, scholars have explained this transformation of an unstable nineteenth-century buffer state into 'Latin America's Switzerland' by Batlle's abandonment of the previously prevailing positivism, embodied by educators José Pedro and Jacobo Varela, and embracement of Heinrich Ahrens's and Guillaume Tiberghien's philosophy of law, a Belgian derivation from Karl Christian Friedrich Krause's idealist philosophy. It aimed at an organic society, social reform, and moral regeneration.

My monograph will challenge the widely accepted notion of a political and ideological rupture after 1903. School reform, which was central to nation-building in Uruguay, started more than thirty years before Batlle's presidency, with the 'Reforma Vareliana', and was continued during his administration. While Comte had no input in this transformation, the more liberal strands of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill did. The heirs of English positivism remained in charge of the influential normal schools until the end of Batlle's second term, while a new generation of philosopher-educators, headed by Carlos Vaz Ferreira, rose out of the crisis of the 'Reforma' in the 1890s and placed more emphasis on experience-based metaphysics. The co-existence and even merger of apparently opposing ideological paradigms, as with Krauso-Positivism, was nothing unique to Uruguay; it could also be observed in Argentina and found its expression in the polemics between reformers on both sides of the River Plate, from Varela and Teacher-President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento to batllistas and Radical leader Hipólito Yrigoyen. My book will uncover these interactions and contribute to a post-revisionist approach.

This research will examine hitherto unknown or neglected primary sources; draw on recent research in History, Philosophy, and Education; and engage with theoretical concepts of frontier modernisation, state formation, nation-building, and modernity. The monograph will explore, from new angles and in trans-national perspective, antecedents of the 'Reforma Vareliana', theideas shaping it, and the continuities in change which characterised batllista education policy.

The primary beneficiaries of this research will be SCHOLARS in the fields mentioned above. In its interdisciplinary and trans-national approach, the monograph will shed new light on Uruguay's late nineteenth and early twentieth-century frontier modernisation within the context of the greater River Plate. The project's focus on school reform, debated all over Latin America at the time, allows for comparisons with Sarmiento's Argentina or Porfírio Díaz's Mexico which figure prominently in university curricula. It is also an advantage that both Batlle and writer José Enrique Rodó, a graduate from Varela's Elbio Fernández School, are well known to UNDERGRADUATE AND POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS who have taken courses in Latin American history and literature. Recent research on the 'reinvention of modernity' (Miller 2008) by post-1900 Latin American intellectuals has reignited interest in this key period, and a reassessment, in research and teaching, of the ideas that shaped the batllistas' rise to power is timely after the completion of Milton Vanger's trilogy on Batlle in 2010.

Secondary academic outputs include three front-loaded articles to be submitted to 'Comparative Studies in Society and History', 'Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies', and 'Latin American Research Review' (focussing on the ideological syncretism at Sarmiento's Escuela de Paraná, the construction of nationhood in Uruguayan textbooks, and Montevideo's Institutos Normales de Señoritas as agencies of nation-building, respectively) and a number of seminar and conference papers ('Transmissions' Conference at Newcastle in March 2011 and convening of a panel at the Society of Latin American Studies Conference in April 2012). While the former are particularly suited for classroom discussion, the latter will include postgraduate students.

Latin America has once again attracted MEDIA interest. After the political shake-ups in Mexico and Venezuela and the elections to the presidency of a former union leader in Brazil, a Left-leaning bishop in Paraguay, the first Indian in Bolivia, and the first women in Chile and Costa Rica, a former tupamaro (urban guerrilla) governs Uruguay. For many, the region is associated with economic failure, political turmoil, and social exclusion. Uruguay, 'Latin America's Switzerland', is an excellent example to counter such generalisations and point to the region's pioneering role: not only was Uruguay one of the first countries to provide free education from primary school to university, a legacy of the 'Reforma Vareliana' and its aftermath; it also became, in 2009, the first nation to give a free laptop to each school child. Such examples and comparisons allow engaging the GENERAL PUBLIC and drawing it into historical explorations. Electronic media and popular publications, such as the 'BBC History' magazine, are excellent outlets.

Another channel to disseminate my research are SCHOOLS. I participated in a Road Show on Iberian Studies for the Hexham-Newcastle Catholic Partnership South. A two-day seminar for circa 100 secondary school teachers in Graz, Austria, in April 2011 will give me another opportunity to talk about Latin America and reach a large number of schools in Styria. I am currently exploring the possibility of seminars for U.K. academies (with J. Anthony, SSAT) and sharing teaching resources (JISC's www.humbox.ac.uk).

This project allows for the INTERNATIONALISATION OF U.K. RESEARCH IN LATIN AMERICA. For my field work, I have received unprecedented support from the Uruguayan government (becoming the first historian authorised to use school archives), SAEP, the Pedagogical Museum, and fellow academics. I am in regular contact with Uruguayan colleagues and, following the completion of my project, I plan a series of papers in the Museum and schools in Montevideo. I have also accepted an invitation to contribute