Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was an Argentine activist, intellectual, writer, statesman and the seventh President of Argentina. His writing spanned a wide range of genres and topics, from journalism to autobiography, to political philosophy and history.
Background
Sarmiento was born in Carrascal, a poor suburb of San Juan, Argentina on February 15, 1811. His father, José Clemente Quiroga Sarmiento y Funes, had served in the military during the wars of independence, returning prisoners of war to San Juan. His mother, Doña Paula Zoila de Albarracín e Irrázabal, was a very pious woman, who lost her father at a young age and was left with very little to support herself. As a result, she took to selling her weaving in order to afford to build a house of her own. On September 21, 1801, José and Paula were married. They had 15 children, 9 of whom died; Domingo was the only son to survive to adulthood.
At the age of four, Sarmiento was taught to read by his father and his uncle, José Eufrasio Quiroga Sarmiento, who later became Bishop of Cuyo. Another uncle who influenced him in his youth was Domingo de Oro, a notable figure in the young Argentine Republic who was influential in bringing Juan Manuel de Rosas to power.
Education
Though he belonged to a very poor family in the year 1816, he started his schooling in one the “Homeland Schools”. His mother, Mrs. Paula Albarracín, encouraged Sarmiento to pursue after finishing his elementary school to study in Cordoba for priest, but he strongly refused the priest proposal and went further by applying for a scholarship to study in Buenos Aires. However, he did not receive the scholarship and was compelled to stay in San Juan. This was the reason he also witnessed the civil wars and went to exile along with his uncle in San Francisco del Monte. There they both built a school and this was the first contact with education. In a short time, Sarmiento went home and began working in his aunt’s shop.
Career
Largely self-taught, Sarmiento began his career as a rural schoolteacher at age 15 and soon entered public life as a provincial legislator. His political activities and his outspokenness provoked the rage of the military dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, who exiled him to Chile in 1840. There Sarmiento was active in politics and became an important figure in journalism through his articles in the Valparaíso newspaper El Mercurio. In 1842 he was appointed founding director of the first teachers’ college in South America and began to give effect to a lifelong conviction that the primary means to national development was through a system of public education.
During that period in Chile, Sarmiento wrote Facundo, an impassioned denunciation of Rosas’s dictatorship in the form of a biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga, Rosas’s tyrannical gaucho lieutenant. The book has been criticized for its erratic style and oversimplifications, but it has also been called the single most important book produced in Spanish America.
In 1845 the Chilean government sent Sarmiento abroad to study educational methods in Europe and the United States. After three years he returned, convinced that the United States provided the model for Latin America to follow in its development. Sarmiento returned to Argentina to help overthrow Rosas in 1852; he continued his writing and educational activities and reentered Argentine politics.
Sarmiento was elected president of Argentina in 1868 and immediately began to apply his liberal ideals - his belief in democratic principles and civil liberties and his opposition to dictatorial regimes in any form - to the building of a new Argentina. He ended the war with Paraguay inherited by his administration and concentrated on domestic achievements. To a largely illiterate country he brought primary and secondary schools, teachers’ colleges, schools for professional and technical training, and libraries and museums.
Sarmineto was elected senator after leaving the presidency. In that capacity, he strongly opposed the election of President Juárez Celman in 1886. For a while Sarmiento served as director general of schools in the government of Buenos Aires.
Sarmiento died in Paraguay, where he had gone frequently in his later years for health reasons.
Sarmiento’s greatest literary achievement was "Facundo", a Juan Manuel de Rosas critique that Sarmiento wrote while he was in exile in Chile. This book brought him recognition from far and wide and he gained popularity for his literary knowledge. He saw this as the new light and expended his efforts to fight against dictatorships, particularly Rosas.
Sarmiento’s major achievements were when he was the president of Argentina. This was the time he worked to ensure children and women were giving Common Education and also for the democracy of Latin America. He made use of his prominent position to modernize and develop a postal system, train systems and comprehensive education system. He spent years in ministerial roles on the state and federal levels and also examined various education systems while he traveled abroad. He founded the first normal school in Chile in 1842.
His impact was not only on the world of education, but also on Argentine political and social structure. His ideas are now revered as innovative, though at the time they were not widely accepted. He was a self-made man and believed in sociological and economic growth for Latin America, something that the Argentine people could not recognize at the time with the soaring standard of living which came with high prices, high wages, and an increased national debt.
There is a building named in his honor at the Argentine embassy in Washington D.C..
Also there is a statue in honor of Sarmiento in Boston on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, between Gloucester and Hereford streets, erected in 1973. There is a square, Plaza Sarmiento in Rosario, Argentina. One of Rodin's last sculptures was that of Sarmiento which is now in Buenos Aires
Though a Catholic himself, he began to adopt the ideas of separation of church and state modeled after the US. He believed that there should be more religious freedom, and less religious affiliation in schools. This was one of many ways in which Sarmiento tried to connect South America to North America.
Politics
Sarmiento was well known for his modernization of the country, and for his improvements to the educational system. He firmly believed in democracy and European liberalism, but was most often seen as a romantic. Sarmiento was well versed in Western philosophy including the works of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. He was particularly fascinated with the liberty given to those living in the United States, which he witnessed as a representative of the Peruvian government. He did, however, see pitfalls to liberty, pointing for example to the aftermath of the French Revolution, which he compared to Argentina's own May Revolution. He believed that liberty could turn into anarchy and thus civil war, which is what happened in France and in Argentina. Therefore, his use of the term "liberty" was more in reference to a laissez-faire approach to the economy, and religious liberty.
Views
Domingo's ideas are now revered as innovative, though at the time they were not widely accepted. He was a self-made man and believed in sociological and economic growth for Latin America, something that the Argentine people could not recognize at the time with the soaring standard of living which came with high prices, high wages, and an increased national debt.
Argentina’s preeminent nineteenth-century man of letters had early and untiringly leveraged writing to enhance personal and national power. By asserting cultural continuity among a markedly diverse range of pre-contact earthen and stone structures, Sarmiento was not positing a new take on hemispheric history, but petitioning that Argentina be inscribed on equal terms within it. In claiming this shared path, lamenting a later historical divergence, and proposing a common future, Sarmiento sought to conjoin the histories of North and South America. Toward this end, what he modeled on the U.S. - and New England in particular - was much more than the pedagogy for which he was and has been known. It was a program for the coercive acquisition and industrialized integration of vast expanses of territory, and the ideal of perpetuating the Anglo-Saxon legacy of Europe in the Americas against lesser elements. Within the creeping logic of scientific racism, he would by the 1880s see these divergent American paths as the outcome of racial segregation and Anglo-Saxon purity in the North, and the mingling of Spanish and indigenous bloodlines in the South.
Quotations:
“Beyond the frontiers and the present, are the monuments of a civilization which has had its dark age but not its renaissance. America has her petrified cities, the abode of a great people who flourished in them, pyramids which rival those of Egypt, temples and palaces which now fertilized the trunks of trees centuries old…when these monuments, which begin with the mound and end with enormous masses of hewn stone, sculptured with a thousand hieroglyphics, have been studied, classified and compared, the history of both Americas will begin upon the same page…”
"We must educate our rulers. An ignorant people will always choose Rosas."
Membership
He was a member of a group of intellectuals, known as the Generation of 1837, who had a great influence on nineteenth-century Argentina.
the Generation
Personality
Domingo was an Argentine intellectual, activist, writer, statesman and the 7th president of Argentina. He wrote on an array of topics and genres. This included journalism to autobiography, history to political philosophy. He was concerned about the educational issues and was the key person to influence literature in this region. Sarmiento was a president from 1868 to 1874 and during this tenure he championed his intelligence of including education for women and children, besides democracy for Latin America. Domingo continuously fought Rosas for his atrocity. Though he was sent to exile, he never bothered and in fact started his first school in exile in Chile. Domingo made use of his prominent position to modernize and develop a postal system, train systems and comprehensive education system. He spent years in ministerial roles on the state and federal levels and also examined various education systems while he traveled abroad.
Physical Characteristics:
Domingo Sarmiento was a baldish person with tough looks on his face. However, he dedicated his life to the country and worked towards the development of the nation in every possible ways. He was a well respected person during and after his time. He worked mainly developing the education system in the country.
Quotes from others about the person
"In contrast to the former colony, with its monarchical and theological spirit, Sarmiento built a new culture! (...) He embodied the ideals of his heroic youth, the teachings of Saint-Simon, following the mirages of socialist romanticism!"
Connections
Sarmiento was focused in developing education and wished to see more literates in Argentina. With this aim, he moved to Pocura to develop his own school. Here he fell in love with a student. Ana Faustina was his first child. In Chile, during his work career, he succeeded as a journalist and was also the education counselor for the government and here he married Benita and adopted his son Dominguito.
