Leading and transforming a nation is a learned endeavor

There is a question worth asking of any country of our tongue: who built it?

Not the armies, which only cleared the ground. Those who came after: those who wrote the constitutions and the codes, founded the universities and libraries, decided what would be taught to children and in which language the nation would be conceived. If you go through that list in almost any country in the Americas, you will find a pattern so consistent that it is surprising how little it is discussed: they were not specialists. They were humanists who also knew how to get things done.

Andrés Bello was a grammarian. A man who dedicated decades to language, poetry, and the philosophy of law. That grammarian founded the University of Chile, was its first rector, and drafted the Chilean Civil Code of 1855, which half the continent took as a model. Read it slowly: the rules that ordered property, marriage, and inheritance in several countries were written by a philologist. Not despite being a philologist. Because of it: he knew what weight each word carries, and a civil code is, above all, words that carry lives.

José Vasconcelos was a philosopher. Mexico placed him at the head of public education in 1921, with the country just emerging from a civil war, and that philosopher organized mass literacy campaigns, sent rural teachers to where the train did not reach, commissioned murals from Rivera and Orozco, and distributed popular editions of Homer and Dante in towns where almost everything was lacking. Someone could have told him that the urgent came first and culture later. Vasconcelos understood that culture was the urgent thing: a country rebuilds itself from the idea it has of itself.

Jorge Basadre was a historian. Peru owes to him the reconstruction of its National Library after the fire of 1943, and something harder to grasp: a concept. The promise of Peruvian life, he called it—the idea that Peru is not a finished fact but a promise that each generation inherits and must decide whether to fulfill. A historian gave his country the very category with which it still debates its destiny today.

The list continues across every country: Rodó writing Ariel to the youth of the continent, Hostos founding schools from Santo Domingo to Chile, Gabriela Mistral moving from rural teacher to reforming entire educational systems. Specialists, in the modern sense, almost none. People who crossed over—law and poetry, history and management, philosophy and politics—all of them.

The Teacher of America

Of that generation, there is a figure that this continent has half-forgotten and whom we ought to recover urgently, among other reasons because he wrote our thesis exactly a century ago.

Pedro Henríquez Ureña was born in Santo Domingo in 1884. He taught in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the United States, Mexico—where he was Vasconcelos's intellectual right hand—Spain, and Argentina, where he died in 1946. Critics call him, without exaggeration, the teacher and guide of America: probably the most complete humanist our language has produced in this hemisphere.

In 1925 he published a short essay, La utopía de América (The Utopia of America), which should be mandatory reading in every rector's office in the region. His diagnosis: the problem of Latin America is not only political or economic; it is, at its heart, cultural. Independence left unanswered the fundamental question of who we are and for what purpose. His warning, which reads like a prophecy today: a society can modernize and yet grow spiritually impoverished—technical progress, on its own, does not build a better people. And his instrument: education, understood not as the transmission of information but as the cultivation of sensibility, discernment, and judgment. A pedagogy, in the words of his commentators, that shapes critical citizens and not mere functional executors.

Mere functional executors. A century before artificial intelligence, the formulation associated with the Dominican already named exactly what no education should ever produce. Today, when execution is precisely what machines do better than us, his phrase has ceased to be a pedagogical opinion. It is a description of the labor market.

What Science Says Today

One might think that all of this is nostalgia for a golden age. The most recent data says otherwise, and says something better.

The largest study on human flourishing ever conducted—over two hundred thousand people in twenty-two countries, led by Baylor and Harvard universities with fieldwork by Gallup—published its first wave of results in 2025. In the overall ranking, Mexico placed among the top in the world: ahead of the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Japan. The Philippines and Indonesia were also high up. The pattern is unmistakable: cultures with strong bonds, active family presence, and shared meaning flourish, not the wealthiest. The same study found a negative correlation between a country's wealth and the sense of purpose reported by its citizens: you can have everything and not know what for.

To put it bluntly: what the most prosperous societies on the planet are trying to recover through surveys and institutes, our culture still possesses. It is one of the few comparative advantages that do not appear in any economic report, and it is probably the most valuable.

But the same study leaves a nuance that cannot be avoided, because it is our task: in Mexico, too, as well as in Argentina and Brazil, young people score lower than their elders. The treasure exists; transmission is the weak link. A flourishing culture does not, by itself, guarantee that its children will inherit the "why."

The Link That Cannot Be Left to Chance

Bring the two halves together, and the question this article wishes to leave on your desk emerges.

The first half: the countries of our language were imagined and built by a minority educated in the applied humanities—people of judgment, word, and courage, capable of crossing disciplines because they had traversed them. The second: that education did not happen on its own. Bello, Vasconcelos, Basadre, and Henríquez Ureña shaped themselves by reading the classics, studying history, debating philosophy, and writing until they found their own voice. There was a method, even if no one called it that.

The question, then: who is applying that method today, deliberately, to those who will lead your country in twenty years?

Because they will exist either way. In twenty years, someone will sign the laws, run the hospitals and companies, and educate everyone's children. The only unknown is their training: whether, in addition to their specialty—which they need, and an excellent one at that—someone will have taught them to think about what is worth building, where their country comes from, and what those who founded it promised.

That education has a known content: books that do not expire, local and universal history, art, the search for meaning, and virtue understood as a habit rather than a discourse. And it has a condition that the founding generation met without intending to, which today must be built deliberately: it is not learned in solitude. It is learned in community, with demanding and supportive teachers, over the course of years.

A university can leave that link to chance, trusting that talent will develop on its own. Or it can decide that the promise of its country's life—each country has its own—deserves a pathway. Henríquez Ureña, who spent his life crossing borders to teach wherever they would let him, had no doubts about the answer. He wrote that America is a task. Tasks do not fulfill themselves: they are entrusted to someone.

The question is to whom. And who is preparing them.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.