140th Anniversary Celebration

The following is the transcript of a speech given at the districts’ 140th anniversary celebration.

Education in Early Santa Barbara
Sally Fouhse
Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation
June 6, 2006

Santa Barbara was founded in 1782 as the last of four presidios, or military forts, established by Spain to protect its northwestern colonial frontier. With a small population of only forty-seven soldiers, about thirty of whom had families, the first generation of Santa Barbara’s residents focused their efforts on building their homes and establishing their subsistence. Most of these settlers were farmers from the interior provinces, and it is likely that they had little, if any, formal education. Unfortunately, we do not have evidence of their making an effort to establish a school during the early years of Santa Barbara’s settlement.

However, at the nearby mission, which was founded four years after the presidio, missionaries provided a range of educational activities to indoctrinate the Chumash Indian neophytes into Catholicism and to teach them European methods of agriculture and manufacture. With this knowledge, and under the direction of the missionaries, the Chumash constructed the complex of mission buildings, operated large ranches, and produced food, textiles, and other material goods for their own subsistence and for limited trade. Selected neophytes were given additional instruction in reading, writing, music, and dance. In addition to performing in the Catholic liturgy, these individuals also played in musical concerts and performed in costumed dance pageants.  In a few instances, neophytes continued their education at the Franciscan College of San Fernando in Mexico City. Within their own families and villages away from the missions during the early years of Spanish contact, the Chumash continued to educate their children in traditional cultural practices.

The Spanish population of Santa Barbara grew slowly, and remained small throughout the Spanish and Mexican periods. Although most of the settlers were of humble origins, higher ranking officers came from wealthier families and were relatively well educated. As these families grew, they may have schooled their children at home themselves, or perhaps have hired a missionary as a private tutor. Priests and lay clergy provided religious instruction in the Catholic tradition. No other forms of education were available locally, much less in other parts of the province during the Spanish and Mexican periods. California’s first primary school opened in San José in 1794, but eventually closed due to low attendance. Twenty years later, Governor Pablo Vicente Solá attempted to establish a broader public school system, but funding for it could not be sustained.

Boys and girls were educated differently, in order to prepare them for their distinct social and economic roles. Boys could apprentice for a trade, or – if their family were wealthy enough – they could travel to either Mexico or Europe for further education. In such cases, they could generally expect to gain employment as a government bureaucrat or military officer. Girls were taught at home and while they may have learned basic skills in reading and writing, their training focused on music, dance, and domestic arts.

José de la Guerra, who came to Santa Barbara in 1815 as the commanding officer of the presidio, illustrates the type of options the wealthy could exercise in educating their children during this time. In addition to his military office, he was also a merchant and trader, and as such had ready access to goods and resources from Mexico, Europe, and the Far East. He developed a small private library in his home, to which his sons and daughters had open access. The books included religious treatises, philosophy, dictionaries, classics of Spanish literature, and even works on agricultural methods. Following their initial home schooling, de la Guerra sent two of his sons, Pablo and Francisco, to be educated in Mexico City. A third son, Juan, spent six years in England attending preparatory school and college. Among the subjects he studied were English, French, Latin, philosophy, history, geography, political science, chemistry and the natural sciences.

One of de la Guerra’s sons-in-law, William Hartnell, opened a boarding school in Monterey in 1834. The school was open to boys over the age of eight. Starting with only three students, two of whom were sons of de la Guerra, within a year the school had eight Hispanic and six Indian students, ranging in age from nine to seventeen, who came from families throughout California.

As we have seen in the case of José de la Guerra, some elite families in California had their own private libraries. The Alvarados, Bandinis, Hartnells, Picos, Vallejos, and others owned not only religious books, but also those by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other writers of the day. The missions, however, maintained an Index of Forbidden Books, and occasionally exercised censorship by publicly burning books that were banned by the Catholic church.

Each of the California missions established a library for the use of its populace, allowing missionaries, neophytes, and even local residents access to a range of spiritual, theoretical, and practical works. These collections included bibles, works on moral theology, preaching, history, agriculture, music, medicine, geography, biography, and architecture. There were dictionaries in Latin, Spanish, and French. Some libraries even included such works as Don Quixote, and Reflections on the French Revolution. At the time that the missions were secularized in the 1830s, it is estimated that together the twenty-one missions held over five thousand books.

While institutional opportunities for education were rare in early California, we have seen that both Hispanic and Indian residents had a variety of less formal options for learning a range of subjects and practical skills. Although the first public school in Santa Barbara was not established until 1855, generations of its elite citizens had maintained a high level of education, while the rest of the population learned the kinds of skills needed to survive in their frontier outpost. Despite its relative isolation, Santa Barbara saw travelers and commerce from around the world on a fairly regular basis. This allowed them to exchange new ideas about politics, philosophy, and other issues of the day. What they may have lacked in formal education, the early residents of Santa Barbara made up for in practical knowledge, spiritual instruction, and the collective wisdom of community life.