In Search of the Practical

picted as oriented toward the humanities, the arts, and politics, and lacking in interest in the practical-in science, technology, industry and commerce.1 While these assertions have considerable merit, it should be noted that there is a contrary current in the upper-class culture of Latin America. One striking expression of this countervailing tendency is the pattern of study of Latin American youths enrolled in foreign universities. While North Americans venture abroad on Fulbrights to study such themes as French attitudes toward Faulkner or the treatment of light in Renaissance paintings, Latin Americans studying abroad have dedicated themselves overwhelmingly to scientific and technical fields. This pattern, familiar in the twentieth century, was already apparent in the middle of the nineteenth, when study in Europe and the United States first began to come into vogue among the Latin American upper classes. One index of a growing Latin interest in technical study after the middle of the nineteenth century can be found in the records of New York state's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Before 1847, during Rensselaer's first quarter-century of existence, not one Latin American attended the institution. But in the twenty-five years between 1850 and 1875 some go youths from the Hispanic world studied there, accounting for more than io percent of the graduates. In the next decade (187585) another sixty Latins attended Rensselaer, making up slightly more than 9 percent of the student body (see table I). After i850 young Latin Americans were carried abroad by the swelling current of foreign trade, which both increased contact with foreign lands and gave the upper class the cash needed to support overseas education. Political developments also affected the pattern of overseas

Geography · Mathematics education · Political science · History and Politics in Latin America · Latin American Cultural Politics · Psychology

• Historiography and Bibliography

  Open Access•Elinor Mondale Gersman•History of Education Quarterly•1975

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• Relaciones científicas de medicina veterinaria venezolana con sus pares latinoamericanos

  Open Access•Yajaira Freites•História Ciências Saúde-Manguinhos•2008

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