Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires

Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, a secondary school established on 14 March 1863 as part of president Bartolomé Mitre's policy for improving public instruction. Its five-year program of studies was developed under the minister of justice and public instruction, Eduardo Costa. The curriculum consisted of humanities and letters (languages and literature), moral sciences (philosophy and history), and natural sciences (mathematics and science). The school occupied the site of the early Jesuit headquarters in Argentina. Its prestigious location, only a few blocks from the central Plaza de Mayo and bounded by Alsina, Bolívar, Moreno, and Peru streets, was the site of several previous schools, including Colegio Máximo de San Ignacio (1767), the Colegio Convictorio y Universidad Máxima de San Carlos (1768), Real Colegio de San Carlos (1783), and Real Colegio de la Unión del Sur (1817). In 1821 the new Universi-dad de Buenos Aires had opened on this site.

The Colegio's first rector in 1863 was Eusebio Agüero. Later that year he was replaced by Amadeo Jacques, who served until his death in 1865. In 1911 Argentine president Roque Sáenz Peña placed the Colegio under the administration of the Universidad de Buenos Aires as the Colegio Nacional Central. From 1919 to 1945 it was called Colegio Nacional San Carlos. In 1945 it returned to the name Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. During the military dictatorship of 1976–1983, the Colegio suffered severe political repression. The government fired professors and "disappeared" 105 students.

The Colegio remains one of the most prestigious secondary schools in Argentina. It has produced many prestigious alumni, including two Nobel laureates, presidents of the republic, and world-renowned musicians.

See alsoEducation: Overview .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diego Abad De Santillán, ed., Gran enciclopedia Argentina, vol. 2 (1951), pp. 330-331. For additional facts on the early history of the school, see Ione S. Wright and Lisa M. Nekhom, Historical Dictionary of Argentina (1978).

Garaño, Santiago, and Werner Pertot. La otra juvenilia: Militancia y represión en el Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, 1971–1986. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2002.

Zago, Manrique, and Fernando Alonso, eds. El Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Manrique Zago Ediciones, 1995.

                                      James A. Baer