The parish schools of the pueblos de indios (New Spain, sixteenth century)
A school built beside the church in every Indian town of New Spain, where the choir met each working day and the boys were taught. Who learned to read was decided by rank: sons of the principales in a room of their own, sons of commoners the doctrine in the open patio and then out to work. The Franciscan who describes the rule also records what happened where it was not kept — commoners came to be elected to municipal office because they could read.
Why this wins its question: English accounts of mission schooling in New Spain run to a sentence about friars teaching the catechism, and where they say more they say it about the one famous college at Tlatelolco. This object goes to the ordinary town school — the room beside the church, the choir that met in it every working day, the doctrine taught outside in the patio in the children's own language — and prints the rank rule in the source's own words, that letters were for the sons of the principales and the commoners' sons were dismissed to work. It then prints the sentence almost never quoted with it: that where the rule was neglected the commoners learned to read and were consequently elected to the offices of the republic. Nothing else in reach states the design and its own failure from the same page.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The description used here is a chapter of a Franciscan history finished at the end of the sixteenth century and first printed in 1870: libro IV, "CAPÍTULO XVI. Del modo que se tiene en enseñar á los niños y niñas, y de las matronas que ayudaron mucho en el ministerio de la Iglesia."
The physical arrangement was standard across the province and was built for the crowd rather than the congregation. Every monastery of New Spain had before its church "un patio grande, cercado", made principally so that on feast days, when the whole town gathered, mass could be heard and the sermon preached in the patio itself, because the body of the church held only those who came on weekdays out of devotion. To one side of the church — commonly the north, the monastery standing on the south — a school was built "en todos los pueblos".
The school's first daily business was music. Every working day, high mass over, the cantores gathered there to provide what was to be sung at vespers if they were to be solemn and at the following day's mass, "porque aunque se diga rezada en ferias y dias simples, siempre cantan un motete en canto de órgano, despues de haber alzado el Santísimo Sacramento"; they also met so that those who knew the chant should teach those who did not, and so that the players of the menestriles should teach one another.
Letters were rationed by rank, and the source states the rule without embarrassment. "En la misma escuela, en otra pieza por sí, ó en la misma si es larga, se enseñan á leer y escribir los niños hijos de la gente mas principal, despues que han sabido la doctrina cristiana, la cual solamente se enseña á los hijos de la gente plebeya allá fuera en el patio, y sabida esta los despiden para que vayan á ayudar á sus padres en sus oficios, granjerías ó trabajos." Reading and writing were for the sons of the indigenous nobility; the sons of commoners got the catechism in the open air and were then returned to work.
Where the rule lapsed it changed who governed, and this is reported as an observed consequence rather than an intention. "Aunque en algunas partes hubo descuido en hacer esta diferencia (especialmente en pueblos pequeños, donde es poca la gente), que sin distincion se enseñan todos los niños, hijos de principales y de plebeyos, á leer y escribir en las escuelas, y de aquí se sigue que en los tales pueblos vienen á regir y mandar los plebeyos, siendo elegidos para los oficios de la república por mas hábiles y suficientes." Literacy acquired by accident promoted commoners into the offices of the indigenous municipal republic.
Girls were taught in the same patios and, on this point, without the rank distinction applied to the boys: "Las niñas todas, así hijas de mayores como de menores, indiferentemente se enseñan en la doctrina cristiana por sus corrillos, repartidas por su órden", moving from one circle to the next as they mastered each stage — per signum, Pater noster and Ave María; then Credo and Salve Regina; then the commandments of God; then the articles of the faith, the commandments of the Church and the sacraments. What they were taught was the catechism and not letters.
The teaching was conducted in the pupils' own language. The graded circles of the girls are described learning the prayers and the doctrine "todo esto en su propria lengua" — that is, in Nahuatl or the local tongue, not in Castilian, which matches the same order's investment in indigenous grammars and vocabularies.
Attendance was organised and supervised, not voluntary in any modern sense. Older women appointed by barrio brought the girls to church, guarded them and returned them home; "y demas de su guarda, hay alguaciles diputados de la iglesia que miran por ellas"; and "los niños y niñas pequeñas tienen viejos por guiadores que los traen de sus casas y los vuelven á llevar". The same old men kept the patios swept and planted in rows with cypresses and orange trees in the hot country.
The higher teaching in the same system had already been abandoned when this was written. The chapter immediately before records that at the Colegio de Santa Cruz the Indians were for a time also taught "la medicina, que ellos usan en conocimiento de yerbas y raices, y otras cosas que aplican en sus enfermedades; mas esto todo se acabó", and that the college by then served "poco mas" than to teach the Indian boys of Tlatelolco, its own town, to read, write and keep good customs.
The witness is an interested one and the object treats him as such. The author is a Franciscan writing his own order's mission thirty to seventy years after the events, the chapter that follows this one states the polemical purpose openly — to confound "la siniestra opinion que algunos han tenido y tienen de los indios, diciendo que no son verdaderamente cristianos" — and what is printed is not his manuscript but an editor's text established from it in 1870. No independent check on the numbers or on how general the arrangement was outside the Franciscan provinces was available for this object.