Educating for industry: Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes and his education project

Abstract

During the centuries that the classic modernity includes the clergy had an active participation in the education, contributing this way to the development of mechanisms that were favoring the reproduction of the social system. In the 18th century the reality started changing. In this respect, the influence of the illustrated ones and the offers of the Bourbon reformismo, as well as the advances scientist-technical personnel promoted new expositions and debates on the type of education that better could answer to the needs of the society. Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes proposed a reinnovating vision of the education that, without going out of the Christian cánones, he was inviting to reforming it preparing the people for the industry. Nevertheless, these educational reforms, which were propitiated at the same time as the economic ones, them illustrated others were not aspiring to change the structures of society, but rather to preserve them. Of this form the education that the author proposes is a way to deepen the religious bows and the civil limits in order to legitimize with more force the hierarchic estamental-order in crisis.