Miguel León-Portilla (1926 – 2019), a Mexican anthropologist and historian, is the foremost authority on the Nahua culture, the dominant culture of pre-Hispanic America, whose most famous representatives are the Aztecs. The study, as well as the tireless work on the preservation of indigenous Mexican cultures and languages, has been his lifelong preoccupation. Citing authentic sources, León-Portilla’s book, “The Philosophy of Náhuatl,” documentedly proves that Nahua sages, tlamatinis, created a purely abstract, philosophical doctrine that reflects their view of the world and humanity.
Goal of Education among the Nahua People
There are many first-hand sources that tell us about tlacahuapahualiztli, or the “art of educating and raising individuals,” in the pre-Hispanic Nahua world.1 There is so much material that a separate book could be written to reconstruct, through an authentic humanistic approach – as Jaeger did in relation to Greek paideia – the rich and profound understanding of humanity contained in the tlacahu. apahualiztliju.
In order to understand from the very beginning what drove Nahue towards education, it must be emphasized that the Nahua had a great interest in including each individual in the life of the community, where they would then have their own special role. This is confirmed by the words of Father José de Acosta, as reported by Clavijero in his History:
“No thing,” Father Acosta says, “has astonished and earned more praise and remembrance from me than the care and order that the Mexicans invested in the education of their children. In fact, it will be difficult to find a people who, in the era of their paganism, put more effort into education as an important contribution to the state.”
First, we will consider the education of children in the household. From the very beginning, it was based on the idea of strength and self-control, which adults conveyed to children through their advice and daily life. In the Mendoza Codex, it can be seen that children were occasionally given reduced meals in order to learn to control their need for food. They were also taught and household chores such as fetching water or firewood. As for parental advice, the following text transmitted by Indian storytellers to Sahagún is significant. It describes the first educational task of a father:
1. – Father of the people: the root and beginning of the human race.
2. – His heart is good, he accepts his duties, he is empathetic, caring, looks after the future, provides support, and protects with his own hands.
3. – He raises, educates, and teaches children, guides and admonishes them, teaches them about life…
As can be confirmed, many of the functions attributed here to the “father of the people” (te-ta) are similar to some characteristics that a teacher has as an educator… he not only raises his children by fulfilling a purely biological role but his main role is to teach, correct, admonish, and prepare them for life.
There are two fundamental principles that guided Nahua education within the home: one is self-control through a series of denials that the child must get used to, and the other is self-knowledge. of one’s true self and what one should become, ingrained based on repeated parental advice. The second stage in the tlacahuapahualiztli process, the art of raising and educating people, began with a child entering educational centers that we would now call public ones. According to the Mendoza Codex, young Nahue were enrolled at the age of fifteen either in the telpochcalli (house of youth) or in the calmécac, a higher-level school where the sons of nobles and future priests were educated. However, as Soustelle records, this document (the Mendoza Codex) contradicts other, more reliable texts. It seems that education exclusively within the family ceased much earlier. Some parents took their children to the calmécac as soon as they could walk, and in any case, they enrolled them in school between the ages of six and nine. However, it is a reliable fact that great importance was placed on the moment when, by enrolling in any school, the child became fully integrated into the life and culture of the community. In his History sti, Sahagún preserved for us a condensed version of the conversation between the student’s father and the priests and school directors who were responsible for the child’s further education.
Contrary to what many believed, these two types of schools did not discriminate based on social class. That is, a child from the common people was not necessarily enrolled in telpochcalli, and a child from a noble class was not necessarily enrolled in calmécac. The Florentine Codex clearly states that the entry into one of these schools directly depended on the parents’ choice.
We know for certain that the vast majority of people, perhaps following a long-standing tradition, dedicated their children to telpochcalli, the school from which they emerged as warriors. However, the most important thing is that all Nahua children and young people, without exception, went to one of these two schools. And, as Soustelle records well:
It is admirable that during that time and on that continent, one indigenous people in America had compulsory education for all, and there was not a single Mexican In the 16th century, regardless of their social background, every child was denied education.
Considering that the highest level of education was transmitted in calmécac, we will convey texts that talk about the way of life there, but also about the highest ideal that was strived for. Sahagún divided in fifteen points what he calls “customs that were observed in the house called calmécac”. Among the most important rules in the document that we would now call a “regulation” and which were supposed to contribute to the development of students’ self-control, we will mention the following:
They all cleaned and swept the house at four in the morning…
They went to the mountain and carried wood on their shoulders…
They prepared the food they ate in the calmécac…
With the sunset, they started preparing everything that was needed…
They taught the boys to speak well, greet and respect their elders…
They taught them all the verses and how to sing them, and they were called divine verses,
and they were written in a sign language on their I was reading books…
And on top of that, they were taught about Indian astrology and dream interpretation and calculating years…
Three points were specifically mentioned in the intellectual instruction. First and foremost, it is about speaking and expression. The Florentine Codex mentions this by saying “they were carefully taught the proper language.” That is, they began their education on an intellectual level with what we now call rhetoric. And the proof that the young people from the calmécac school came out well-educated can be seen in numerous speeches preserved in the Huehuetlatolli collection, as well as in the texts of Indian storytellers. Another confirmation of the significant difference between cultivated or “noble” speech and the common speech of the people can be seen in the different terms they used for them: macehuallatolli (the people’s way of speaking) and tepillatolli (cultivated or noble speech).
Another aspect of intellectual education mentioned by Sahagún, and confirmed by most chroniclers, is learning songs (cuícatl), especially “divine songs” which, according to the note from the manuscript… In the Florentine Codex, it was “recorded in codices”. This contributed, perhaps more than anything else, to the students adopting religious and philosophical teachings that, as we have seen before, were always expressed through poetry: “with flowers and songs.”
Alongside the songs that contained the most sublime thoughts of tlamatinis, the momachtique (students) learned the art of chronology and astrology.
To at least give an idea of the extent of this later aspect of education in the calmecac, it is necessary to recall the diversity and complexity of the elements that must be taken into account in order to master just the tonalámatl (calendar of 260 days). This, as well as the complex mathematical operations required for astronomical calculations, once again highlights what we have already said: that Nahua thought had reached a very high degree of rational abstraction. Therefore, by teaching students through chants, it conveyed lamatinis fulfilled their task of “making foreign faces wise” by educating and training their students in the calmécac to perfect their personalities in two fundamental aspects: imparting wisdom to their faces and strength to their hearts. This is confirmed by two Nahua texts of authentic historical value. The first – from Sahagún’s narrators – speaks of the ideal of a mature person, saying:
A mature person:
heart firm as a stone,
face wise,
master of face and heart,
capable and full of understanding.
Such was their “flower and song” of philosophical thinking. And by transmitting knowledge and the skill of using chronological-astronomical systems, they taught them exact mathematical thinking.
The goal was deeply humanistic, pursued by the tlamatinime in educating the young generations. Another text to which we previously pointed out, in order to confirm what we said about the Nahua educational ideal, comes from the Florentine Codex and refers to the qualities that those who would be chosen as high priests must have:
Even when he was poor and destitute,
even when his mother and father
were poor,
the poorest of the poor…
his origin was not taken into account,
only his way of life was considered…
the purity of his heart,
his kind and humane heart…
his strong heart…
it was said that he carried God in his heart,
that he was wise in matters concerning God…
It was the highest human ideal to which tlacahuapahualiztli, the art of upbringing and educating people, aspired.
The very word tlacahuapahualiztli, composed of tlaca, “people,” and huapahualiztli, an abstract term meaning “upbringing or education,” reflects the Nahua’s consciousness of their own educational ideals. Today we would call it “the art of education”.
2 The word calmécac is composed of calli, “house”, and mécatl, “rope”, and literally means “houses tied together with a rope”. It refers to the series of rooms in monasteries where teaching and the transmission of the highest knowledge of Nahua culture took place.