Simón Rodríguez: Father of Revolutionary Teaching

Simon Rodriguez was born in Caracas on October 28, 1769. Pedagogue, philosopher, writer of dense works of historical and sociological content, and an in-depth knowledge of Spanish-American society. He was the teacher and mentor of the Liberator Simon Bolivar.

In 1794, he presented to the City Council his Reflections on the defects that vitiate the school of first letters in Caracas and the means of achieving its reform by a new establishment. This is a critical approach to colonial teaching. In 1795, when the boy Bolívar escaped from his guardian's house, he was sent to live in the house of his teacher Simón Rodríguez, under his tutoring.

Together they set out in March 1805, on a journey that took them to Lyon and Chambery and then crossed the Alps and entered Italy: Milan. On August 15 of that same year, they climbed the Holy Mountain, in Rome, and Rodríguez collected for posterity the oath that his disciple took there: “I swear before you; I swear by the God of my parents; I swear by them; I swear by my honor; and I swear by my country; that I will not give rest to my arm, nor rest to my soul, until I have broken the chains that oppress us by the will of the Spanish power”.

Don Simón Rodríguez, the forerunner and animator of Bolivarian concern, is par excellence the Master of the Liberator; before he became independent of America, Rodríguez (his “Universal Teacher”) does his homework: he makes Bolivar independent, divorces him from traditional reality and brings him closer to future truth; he helps him to achieve his own perspective of a creator, to sense his work and to calculate the forces of his assistants and his enemies. Simón Rodríguez calls on Bolívar to be terribly sane among those mediocre self-esteem who are the repositories of good judgment and wisdom, and in the eyes of whom Independence had to be a singular madness.

Simón Rodríguez used to say: “I don't want to look like trees, which take root in one place; I want to look like the wind, the water, the sun, all those things that go on endlessly.” In the final years of his life, Simón Rodríguez went to Guayaquil, where he lost much of his work due to a fire that devastated much of the city. In 1853, he undertook a new trip to Peru, accompanied by his son José and his friend Camilo Gómez, who would assist him at the time of his death, which occurred in the town of Amotape on July 17, 1853. Seventy years later, his remains were transferred to the Pantheon of the Proceres in Lima, and from there, just a century after his death, they were returned to Caracas, his hometown, where they rest in the National Pantheon.

Mazo News Team