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T H K CUBA R K V T F. W 



EDUCATION IN CUBA 



CUBA NEGLECTED BY SPAIN EDUCATIONAL AWAKENING BROUGHT BY 

 THE FIRST AMERICAN INTERVENTION 



From an article liy R. L. Rullard in tlio liditcatidiial Rcviczv (X. V.) for April 

 on education in Ciilia, the following extracts arc taken. The writer has studied 

 his subjects deeply and evidently at lirst liand and his article gives a comprehensive 

 analysis of educational condition in the island. 



In matters of education he says, Cuba had in all ways been neglected by Spain. 

 The rich or well-to-do only received an education, the people none. The few schools 

 were maiidy of the church and teaching, high or low, was in the hands of friars or 

 parish priests as in Spain in the middle ages. The opening of the nineteenth century 

 saw some faint governmental effort, wholly inadequate, to improve and establish primary 

 education: but the few schools opened were poor, weak, lifeless things that naturally 

 gave little result. They were unpopular, the teachers miserable, poverty stricken and 

 without standing. During that period some educational plans, orders or laws were 

 put forth, and on paper there were a thousand schools, and the Institutos and the 

 University were in operation, but nothing effective in education had really been done. 

 The University had indeed a large attendance — live to eight hundred — but as it had 

 continued to accept and graduate the ill prepared students of the common schools with 

 almost no basis of education it brought upon itself the reputation of being largely 

 a "title mill." Altogether it may ]w said there never was in Cul)a under Spain anything 

 like popular education. 



The first American intervention* brought to Cul)a her I'lrst educational 

 awakening. Great appropriations were made, new laws and orders established, 

 and in a few months the wretched, inefficient and merely nominal schools of Spain's 

 regime were made real, and trebled in number. A complete system, taken from 

 the school laws of the State of Ohio, was established, and under zealous, disin- 

 terested American officials put in effective operation throughout the island. This system 

 provided for payment of all costs from the national treasury, participation in school 

 matters by the people through officials by themselves elected and government participa- 



* The first intervention took place in September, 1<H)(). 



Exterior one-room school house from plans prepared by the Department of Education 

 during the American interventions. 



