Real Seminario de Minería (Mexico City, founded by the Ordenanzas of 1783)
The mining college ordered for New Spain by the royal mining code of 22 May 1783: endowed places for twenty-five boys, Spanish or noble Indian, and — in the article next to it — free entry and free tuition for any child whose parents wished to put them into the career. Its professors taught mathematics and experimental physics, owed a written dissertation every six months, and its graduates had to spend three years at the mine face before they could be examined.
Why this wins its question: The Real Seminario is usually mentioned only as the place where Andrés Manuel del Río found vanadium, with its charter unquoted. This object cites the founding articles from the ordinances themselves — free tuition for day pupils, twenty-five endowed places open to noble Indians, professors bound to a dissertation every six months, three years at the mine face before examination, ore samples levied from working mines to stock the cabinet — and sets against them the contemporary account of what the school still lacked in 1803. The charter and its shortfall in one place, from primary print.
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 college was ordered by Título 18 of the Reales Ordenanzas of the mining corps of New Spain, signed by the King at Aranjuez on 22 May 1783 and countersigned by José de Gálvez, and noted in the Contaduría General de Indias at Madrid on 25 May 1783.
Article 6 of that title gave the establishment its name: "El mencionado Colegio ha de tener el título de Real Seminario de Minería."
Article 2 endowed twenty-five places, with food and clothing, for "Niños Españoles, ó Indios nobles de legítimo nacimiento", preferring the descendants and near relatives of miners and especially those whose fathers were settled in the mining reales.
Article 3 went further than the endowment: it granted free entry to the schools and free instruction — "libre entrada á las Escuelas, y la instruccion gratuita" — to all children whose parents or guardians wished to put them into this career, attending the lessons daily from their own homes. Boarding inside the college was the part reserved by "calidad y nacimiento", and had to be paid for; the day teaching was not.
Article 4 required salaried secular professors to teach the sciences, mathematics and experimental physics bearing on mining; article 5 added masters of the mechanical arts needed to work timber, metals and stone for the machines and instruments used underground and in ore dressing, and a master of drawing and delineation.
Article 12 obliged every professor, beyond daily theoretical and practical lessons, to submit a memoria or dissertation every six months on some useful mining subject, to be read to the Real Tribunal de Minería, kept in its archive and printed for the public when thought convenient; article 13 required the collegians and students to hold annual public acts before the Tribunal, with prizes in proportion to what they showed.
Article 14 required graduates to spend three years at the mining reales practising with the district's perito facultativo or perito beneficiador, then to be examined at the Real Tribunal in theory and in practice; those approved received their title without paying any fee for it and were posted as peritos or as inspectors for the mines the Banco financed.
Article 15 obliged owners and aviadores who brought their silver to Mexico City to deposit samples of their ores in the college's metallic cabinet, so that their quality and best treatment could be examined there — building the teaching collection out of the working mines by law.
Humboldt, who saw the establishment in 1803-1804, recorded that its pupils were instructed at the state's expense and sent out by the Tribunal to the head towns of the mining diputaciones, and that the college where "españoles, criollos é indios nobles" were educated cost no more than 30,000 pesos a year, against 25,000 in salaries for the Tribunal's own members.
The same observer put the institution's shortfalls on the record: the school's cabinet still lacked a complete collection of the country's minerals, so that the mineralogical geography of New Spain could not be studied there; no plan existed of workings already driven; and although the Tribunal and the professors of the school had long since noticed the defects of the prevailing methods, he judged that change would be very slow in a country where the government had little influence over workings that belonged to private individuals.
The opening was real but bounded. The endowed places required legitimate birth and, for indigenous candidates, noble status; Humboldt's description of who was actually educated there — Spaniards, creoles and noble Indians — matches that restriction rather than the wider grant of article 3, and no source consulted here shows how many day pupils took up the free instruction.