The Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences ( (UMCE), is a public and traditional university located in the commune of Ñuñoa, Chile. It is the fourth oldest university in the country, founded in 1889 as college of the University of Chile.
History
Origins
Ignacio Domeyko, scientist and professor of the National Institute José Miguel Carrera, manifests for the first time -during one year of 1842- the need to change the education system in Chile, inspired by the models that are being implemented in Europe where it was starting to develop a new science: pedagogy. At that time, Domeyko was a young immigrant in the university lessons around his homeland, particularly in Paris, France, he gave a lot of knowledge that was not limited to the natural sciences, if it was not an innovation in ideas for the organization that did not find education in this country, and that motivated him to start a slow but significant intellectual work.
The proposal of the Polish-nationalized Chilean teacher was that a normal school was created similar to the one he had known by the hand of the French philosopher Victor Cousin. In this project, use a dozen of the laws that were granted from the liberal government of Francisco Antonio Pinto and Diaz de la Puente to the National Institute in 1829, students from all over the country, settle in a special department of the prominent lyceum for two years, reviewing the studies that have already been taught in their schools, and then specialize in the area they are most interested in for another two years at the university.
Diego Barros Arana, philosopher and historian, assumes the rector of the National Institute between 1863 and 1872. Noticing from the outset the lack of preparation of Chilean teaching staff, he also realized that even under the direction of this institution, which had the best national teachers (among them the professors Amunátegui, Vendel-Heyl, Lobeck, Pizarro) 14, the teaching was rough and did not have the didactics that he considered necessary. In this period, he would create a failed Teachers' Association.
Many intellectuals were educated by this eminent historian (who before becoming rector, was professor since 1838 in which he is also his alma mater) among which Valentín Letelier, the main intellectual manager of the Pedagogical Institute, who would be strongly moved with the way of educating Arana, who never stopped visiting the classrooms or the students, concerned at all times not to be a simple minister of faith in charge of certifying a certain event, but to excite, interest and guide the intelligences educated.
Its creation was firmly defended by numerous statesmen and teachers, among whom Don Valentín Letelier distinguished himself, who defended the Pedagogical with so much integrity that he even affirmed that suppressing it is making it impossible to train Chilean professors; is to make us perpetual tributaries of foreign pedagogy. Especially influenced by the aforementioned experience he had with Barros Arana during his basic studies: "In Chile it is generally believed that any engineer can be a good teacher of mathematics, that every doctor is competent in the natural sciences, and that the teaching of the humanities is put in good hands when entrusted to lawyers. This is a very serious error because the most proper thing to assess the suitability of a teacher is not his knowledge, it is his didactics."
Manuel Montt would try to take up Domeyko's original idea of annexing the hypothetical Pedagogical Institute to the National Institute, which would award 20 scholarships for aspiring professors, but in doing so it would be inevitable to absorb the old establishment for the new one, as had happened before when the Instituto Nacional General José Miguel Carrera disarmed the entire building and academic body of the Royal University of San Felipe in 1813, so the idea was discarded.
The Pedagogical Institute
In 1888, during the government of the liberal president José Manuel Balmaceda, the Minister of Justice, Worship and Public Instruction (equivalent to the current Ministry of Education) Federico Puga Borne - as well as Letelier, a former institute and former student of Professor Arana - builds the formation decree of the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile, which safeguarded the budget that allowed to give life to the project after 40 years of waiting. The sum was forty thousand Chilean pesos, and was signed the following year by the new minister Julio Bañados Espinosa on April 29, 1889.