/ PATRIOTISM AND COLONIZATION /
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Don't get angry about a flag,
which is nothing more than three meters of cotton
on the end of a pole.
J. SimonPatriotism and Colonization. What is the poor man's homeland? This is the title of the Third Reading Book of the Modern School, founded in 1901 by Ferrer i Guardia. The book in question was published in 1904 with a prologue by Élisée Reclus and its index is structured on short fragments of dozens of writers and thinkers who, at the time, denounced the scourge of identity nationalism and the colonial logic underlying it. Interspersed among the fragments are illustrations in which the political character of the book is evident: bourgeois with round bellies, vinegary priests, military men with the faces of assassins, trampled workers, aborigines enslaved and massacred by the colonizers, etc. But this is not a doctrinaire work, but a genuinely pedagogical book that, displaying an enviable freedom, shows authors as distant as Voltaire, Dumas, Pascal, Herbert Spencer, Tolstoy, Daudet, Flammarion, Victor Hugo, Montaigne, Schiller, Lao-Tsé, Goethe or the Baron de Floutan.
Thanks to these fragments, schoolchildren took their first steps both in social criticism and in what was called great literature. Patriotism and Colonization is an intelligent, subtle book that has not aged badly, especially if we compare it with the detestable reading manuals based on infantilism, color inflation and unsalted jokes to which millions of children are subjected today in the schools of this country.