Enrique Rébsamen: the Swiss educator who changed the way we teach in Mexico during the Porfiriato

Throughout Mexico's history, some characters have stood out in different fields. Whether in art, politics, philosophy, or teaching, there are several names that stand out. Precisely, in the last of these, teaching, there was a man who made a big difference.

This is Henry Conrad Rébsamen Egloff, a man born on February 8, 1857 in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Rébsamen was a leading educator in Mexico, whose educational reforms had a decisive influence on the country's current education system. His training was strongly influenced by the area of pedagogy. He earned diplomas to serve as a primary and secondary school teacher. In addition, he had extensive training in the areas of commerce, languages, botany, geology and paleontology.

He studied as a teacher and graduated from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Dedicated to pedagogy, he teaches and studies in Bavaria, England and France.

At that time, then President of Mexico, Porfirio Díaz Mori, became interested in his work, and recommended it with Juan de la Luz Enríquez, who was governor of the state of Veracruz and managed a far-reaching state education project.

He arrived in Mexico in 1885, when he was barely 26 years old. Following Porfirio Díaz's recommendation, Governor Enríquez sent him to Orizaba to organize a quick course on teacher training for the Model School, being a precursor to modern training courses.

In Veracruz, he began the deployment to other areas of a transcendent educational work for twentieth-century Mexico. From there, Rébsamen and his disciples projected Veracruz nationally, and even outside Mexico, as rarely in the history of the State.

In 1886, Enríquez commissioned Rébsamen to create a Normal School in Xalapa, and an adjoining experimental school, which began operating the following year with 25 students. Years later, between 1894 and 1900, he worked in Guanajuato, where he founded the León Normal School on November 3, 1894; he drafted the Law and Regulations on Primary Education at the state level, which presented as a special modality the creation of model schools in 1895, among other things.

Rébsamen was a key element in the founding of the first Normal Schools in Mexico, which were considered collegiate bodies capable of sustaining and dictating the pedagogical doctrine and scientific bases that would regulate the development of education, mainly in public institutions. He also founded the National Academy, was a spokesperson and pedagogical propagator of the Jalapa Normal School in 1885, the Normal School of Mexico City, on whose project Ignacio M. Altamirano worked. In 1901, Porfirio Díaz appointed him General Director of Normal Education.

His ideas were disseminated through Mexico Intelectual, a newspaper of the Normal School that he directed. In 1889, he represented Veracruz at the National Pedagogical Congress, of which he was vice president. Rébsamen played a leading role in modern education at the end of the 19th century. His contributions form a pioneering thought of the thematization of didactics and the curricular treatment developed throughout the twentieth century. In addition, in the Ministry of Public Education (SEP), there is a statue that pays homage to the Swiss pedagogue.

He was a man of ideas and reflections on education ahead of his time, he left a work enough, whose contributions affected the emergence of a new Mexican pedagogy, whose principles are still present and whose main objective is person-centered education, on the free and creative development of the human being.

Rébsamen died on a day like today, April 8, 1904, at the age of 47, in Xalapa Enríquez, Veracruz.

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