Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was President of Argentina from 1868 to 1874 and the country's most influential educator, a man who built a school system and argued that his own countrymen were the problem. Born in San Juan in 1811 into a poor family, he was largely self-taught, opened a school at fifteen, and was repeatedly exiled to Chile for opposing the caudillos. In Chile he worked as a journalist, founded the first teacher-training college in South America in 1842, and wrote Facundo in 1845. Nominally a biography of the provincial warlord Facundo Quiroga, it is an argument that Argentina's conflict is between civilisation, meaning the European city, and barbarism, meaning the rural interior, the gaucho and the indigenous population. It remains a foundational Latin American text and its premise is now widely read as racist. He toured Europe and the United States, and was deeply impressed by Horace Mann's public schools in Massachusetts, becoming a friend of Mann and his wife. He returned to fight against Juan Manuel de Rosas, served as governor of San Juan and as minister to the United States, and was elected president in absentia in 1868. As president he raised school enrolment sharply, founded hundreds of schools, imported sixty-five American women teachers to staff normal schools, established the national observatory and the military and naval academies, and took the first national census. He also promoted European immigration and prosecuted the war against Paraguay and campaigns against indigenous peoples, both with heavy loss of life. He died in Asunción in 1888. His birthday, 11 September, is Teachers' Day across much of Latin America.

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