This evening José Vasconselos came to see me and we talked for nearly
two hours. He is head of the Department of Education. I am told he is
one of the most brilliant and most promising men of Mexico. I felt that
a talk with him would do much to help me to understand what the present
Government is aiming at, and what effort is being made for the future
of Mexico. I tackled him at once very frankly about his education
system. I said to him: “The bourgeois tell me that you have caused
to be printed 20,000 copies of Shakespeare and Homer for illiterate
Indians, who can neither read nor write.”
This criticism was no news to him, he proceeded to explain to me that
these classics were for the town libraries, and there were 10,000
towns. “What would you put in the libraries?” he asked--“What would
you have the people read as soon as they can read?” He said that he
was basing his system on the Carnegie System, and that during one of
the former Revolutions when he was an exile, he lived at San Antonio,
Texas. There he went into the Public Library and borrowed an edition of
Plato. Every book that is loaned is inscribed with the name and date of
the person to whom it is loaned. “In one year, that volume of Plato had
been loaned to thirty people, and that was San Antonio, a community of
cowboys.”
He explained to me his great difficulty in getting enough books for
the 10,000 libraries. He said that if he wrote to Madrid for 10,000
volumes of Don Quixote, they could only supply him with 500. So he
must get them printed himself. He promised me a complete set of the
standard library works. This had nothing to do with the elementary
books distributed to the schools. He said he would like me to see, in
some of the little towns how keen the Indian parents are on education
for their children.
“When the next generation are educated--then will evolve the real
Socialist State!” he said.
He referred to the reign of Porfirio Diaz as having accomplished
nothing for the education of the masses. His ideas about social reform
are Spartacist, he quoted Liebknecht and said that he favored the plan
of limited fortunes, rather than communism, as the one seemed to him to
kill initiative, and he did not like the idea of being a slave to the
State. The only class he really despised was the bourgeois, “people who
eat three meals a day, how can their brains work--?” People who assume
an attitude of culture, but who never open a book, certainly not a
classic. How dared they attempt to criticize! “The only thing in their
favor in this country is that at least they don’t have any part in the
affairs of the government!”
Vasconselos is a queer personality, mixture of Spanish and Mexican,
yet he said he cared nothing for the civilization of the Occident, he
understood better the Orient, and followed in the train of Tagore, whom
he talked of with great admiration. I asked him whether on the whole
he was satisfied with the way things were shaping for Mexico, and he
said he was certainly satisfied. That in his opinion revolutions were
a thing of the past, there were a stirring and an awakening all through
the land.
We discussed literature, art, social reforms, education of children,
Russian evolution, the compromises of Lenin, the activities of Trotzky,
the prejudices, the ignorances, the indifferences of the bourgeois, the
national spirit of Mexico, the planet we live in and the ineptitude
of humans to adapt themselves to it. He said he felt it was almost a
crime to put children into the world: “If they are stupid, indifferent
and incapable of thought they are little better than the brutes, if
they are intellectuals and have any ideas and ideals at all, then they
suffer unendurably--No, this world, even with its mountains and its
lakes and its vegetation, it is no place for humans...!”