The historiography dealing with the evolution of elementary education in the Spanish American colonial period is relatively abundant. However, a great part of the literature has a regional or national scope, and in general does not give an idea of tendencies or the scale of education, which makes a general evaluation difficult. This paper tries to present such an evaluation based on the available secondary sources, and covers the whole of Spanish America during the century prior to Independence. It attempts to describe concisely both the consolidation of the institutions which had been evolving since the Conquest, and the series of changes which, it concludes, anticipate the educational transformations of the nineteenth century.

Les commémorations se multiplient à plaisir. Mais encore que nos sociétés de la ‘communication’ génèrent à toute occasion des promenades guidées dans le passé, il serait naïf d'y voir pour autant un goût de la connaissance désintéressée ou une aspiration à la vérité. Au contraire, celle-ci est plus souvent malmenée que respectée dans ces manifestations qui visent l'histoire utile’, c'est-à-dire qui pratiquent assidûment le recyclage de l'histoire au profit d'une solidarité de groupe qu'il s'agit de raffermir. Renforcer la cohésion des families idéologiques ou des sensibilites politiques, là est le véritable enjeu des commemorations. Celles-ci constituent done avant tout des terrains d'affrontements. Ceci peut offrir l'occasion d'un approfondissement du savoir, mais là ne se trouve pas le but de l'exercice. Ici e'est la communication qui règne, véritable auberge espagnole où d'authentiques ouvriers de la connaissance se rencontrent aux côtés de discoureurs ou de publicistes au statut plus incertain.

Peasants is a blanket term for all those who, one way or another are involved in agrarian activities, be it as a labourer, a herdsman, a sharecropper, a tenant, an independent cultivator or in a combination of two or more of these activities. Besides this, one will have to account for part-time income from migratory labour or economic activities as home industries, petty trade, transport or mining. Many peasant societies are internally stratified into richer peasants, sometimes village élites, middle peasants and their poor brethren. In Western Europe and in Mexico most peasants belonged to the latter category. For them Darnton's conclusion, ‘to eat or not to eat, that was die question peasants confronted in their folklore as well as in their daily lives’ was certainly valid, and, out of necessity, these peasants were often looking for additional land or income. They were, for that matter, mobile.

No doubt few countries in the world are as centralized as Argentina. Most important activities take place in the Capital, Buenos Aires, a giant, sprawling megalopolis of about fifteen million inhabitants. Like government and business, historical research is carried out chiefly here. Indeed, there is no shortage of libraries and archives in Buenos Aires, but it takes quite some planning to make good use of these facilities.