The childhood of the Nation. Policies and cultural strategies in the process of citizenship Education in Colombia: from1810 to 1860

Abstract

Abstract In this article is argued that the citizens, as well as the Nation-State, are a cultural construction. Being and feeling a citizen is not “natural”, but the result of a cultural process in the history of each one and in the collective of a society. The citizen is not born, it is formed. However, this construction involves the setting up of a whole speech from the legal and political, resulting in a series of social practices that go through the political and electoral field, and are spread through out the social network with a prism of practices and cultural behaviors which have their expression in the sphere of public life to the private living spaces. To fulfill this cultural and political project, the State designed in the first half of the nineteenth century a number of strategies and pedagogies, aimed at imposing a model of subjects enrolled in the ideology and symbolic language of modernity. A man who would be the support of the new national state that was intended to implement.