Abstract

The decade of 1840 marks a before-and-after period for the general history of culture and education in Chile. The consolidation of an institutional order based on liberal principles characterizes this new period with the opening of the Universidad de Chile and the Escuela Normal de Profesores (1842). In this context, schoolbooks evolve as cultural artifacts, encouraged by the policy of expansion of the public-education reform. The latter, controlled by the state, reaffirmed its essential importance in order to “civilize and moralize” the new citizens for the republic. In this trend, the following research explores the elements that intervened in the creation of such textbooks. What stands out among them: the educational ideology reflected within the books, the role played by the University Council as an instance of censorship of those works, and the position played by the authors of those texts as agents of social change through the different forms of written production they arranged.