A heuristics for the study of the history of reforms and conflicts in the latin american university

Abstract

Since the manifesto of Córdoba (1918) the history of advanced education in Latin America and in Colombia has been constructed from a double perspective: on the one hand, the origin and modernization of university projects enhanced by national states and on the other hand the demands of reform of university movements. While educational modernization in national states has been promoted as a top down policy, the university actors (students and professors) have denounced such policy as foreign to the requirements of the institution grounded on two principles which are inherent to its basic excellence in its three fundamental tasks: research, teaching and extension and its relation to society, an aspect which is part of the political and socio-economic problems of the continent and the country, which therefore requires new theoretical perspectives and a method on historical approaches.