Antonio José Coelho: a Brazilian at the origins of Salvadoran education

Abstract

In the third decade of the 19th century, the Salvadoran government made the decision to implement the Lancasterian system of mutual or memorization teaching among the population of the city of San Salvador. An educator originally from Brazil played an essential role in this task, about whose life and pedagogical work very little is known. A very interesting aspect was the social rejection that Coelho generated due to his syncretic culture of origin, his questioning of local traditions and his scant adherence to the predominant Catholicism. In addition, his work regarding the acclimatization of plant species is also a very unknown aspect of his work in the national territory. In this sense, his experiments with coffee and mango would be striking for developing more studies about the history of applied botany in El Salvador, long before the pioneering work of scientists such as doctors David Joaquín Guzmán Martorell, Darío González Guerra and others. This text -researched and written intermittently between 2001 and 2024- aims to lay the foundations for further research into national educational development in the first decades of independent life, after the political separation of Spain and Mexico and while the Salvadoran State was linked to the regional federal republic.