When I told people in Argentina that I knew nothing about Argentina or Sarmiento (the first president of Argentina) before I came, their faces fell.\u00a0 But when I told them what I have learned and how Sarmiento is simular, if not greater than our greatest progressive leaders in the United States, they were amazed by our connection.\u00a0 After visiting the house of Sarmiento and three hour long speeches about the life and work of this great man, I have become inspired.<\/p>\n
Before Sarmiento became president, he was the governor of San Juan, a state than has 2% of Argentina\u2019s population.\u00a0 There was no way he could get the name recognition to defeat a violent dictator who wanted to keep people out of schools so they would not learn the skills to defeat him.\u00a0 There were many times that Sarmiento could have decided that this was not his fight, that it wasn\u2019t worth it, because he was politically alone.<\/p>\n
However, Sarmiento taught HIMSELF french, and traveled to North Africa to learn about their political system and to make connections that would help him develop the country he loved.\u00a0 He then taught\u00a0HIMSELF English, and traveled to Boston to look for teachers, but fell in love with Winona while visiting the first teaching school west of the Mississippi, 150 years ago.\u00a0 He recruited 60 teachers in all, but the ones he liked the most, and who were most successful were from Winona State.<\/p>\n
However,\u00a0before he could come back to Argentina to run for President, he was in exile in Chile (the boardering country to San Juan).\u00a0 But instead of giving up, he attacked Rosas (the dictator) persistenly through the newspapers in Chile, to build his name recongition in all of Argentina.\u00a0 Then, he swept back into Argentina with a system of education that he\u00a0was ready to impliment in Argentina,\u00a0to ensure that\u00a0Democracy would last.\u00a0 This was the start of Argentina\u2019s democracy, it is nation building at its best.<\/p>\n
The people in\u00a0San Juan have thanked us over and over\u00a0for the great role that US education has had in Argentina.\u00a0 But it is Sarmiento who we should all thank, for not giving up, for doing the hard work to go person to person to develop connections, and to put it all together to create change that has lasted for 150 years.\u00a0 He is simular, if not better than great American presidents.\u00a0 FDR created medicare and social security so that our seniors don\u2019t have to live their final years in poverty.\u00a0 Obama decided to stake his polical career on ensuring that 32 million people in this country will be insured in the year 2014.\u00a0 Each of these three great leaders made great sacrifices and showed great persistence to create change that we all take for granted, but we know\u00a0that it\u00a0is better to not live\u00a0without it.\u00a0 Argentina and the United States, San Juan and Winona, have great simularities.\u00a0 We can both learn from each other, and we have made the connections in San Juan to build for the future.<\/p>\n
-Harrisen Ornes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I told people in Argentina that I knew nothing about Argentina or Sarmiento (the first president of Argentina) before I came, their faces fell.\u00a0 But when I told them what I have learned and how Sarmiento is simular, if not greater than our greatest progressive leaders in the United States, they were amazed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[113,162],"tags":[209],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coe","category-travel","tag-argentina"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pb2ffS-8T","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1971,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions\/1971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}