ROSARIO VERA PEÑALOZA: BIOGRAPHY, CONTRIBUTIONS, WORKS, QUOTES - BIOGRAPHIES - 2025

Rosario Vera Peñaloza (1872-1950) was a pedagogue and educator of Argentine origin. She is recognized for dedicating herself to the study and development of preschool education, as well as for her incessant search to provide comprehensive training to children, in which the artistic, physical, manual and musical aspects are taken into account.

She was the founder of the first kindergarten in Argentina, several schools, libraries and museums. During her more than 25 years of experience in the educational field, she held 22 public positions in La Rioja, Córdoba and Buenos Aires, including the management of the Argentine Museum.

Portrait of Rosario Vera Peñaloza. Source: General Archive of the Nation

The main educational postulates of Rosario Vera Peñaloza were creative activity, knowledge through games and exploration. She also had great interest in cultivating oral expression from the early years, for this reason she gave great importance to children's literature and creative storytelling in children.

In his memory, May 28, the date of his death, was named as National Day of Kindergartens and Day of the Master Gardener.

Biography

Early years

On December 25, 1873, Rosario Vera Peñaloza was born in a small town in the Riojan plains called Atiles, in the town of Malanzán, Argentina. Her parents were Don Eloy Vera and Mercedes Peñaloza, who previously had three other children. It was a family of landowners from La Rioja, linked to the civil and military history of the northern province.

At age 10, he lost his father and soon after his mother, so he was left in the care of his maternal aunt and foster mother in those first years of life: Doña Jesusa Peñaloza de Ocampo.

He entered primary school from an early age in the neighboring city of San Juan, as public schools had disappeared in La Rioja at the time of the Argentine civil wars. In 1884 he returned to his hometown to do the Normal School. Four years later she received the title of normalista teacher.

Later he moved to Paraná, where he trained at the Normal School of Teachers and graduated with a Higher Education degree in 1894.

Beginnings in teaching

He began to exercise his profession and his vocation as a teacher from the following year of graduation in that same city on the coast.

At the same time, she attended the Kindergarten Teachers of Sara Chamberlain from Eccleston, who was one of the Froebelian American teachers specialized in initial education and one of the first teacher educators in Argentina.

In 1900 he founded the first kindergarten, which was attached to the Normal School. Today it bears his name. Then he founded another series of gardens in Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Paraná.

She was appointed deputy director of the Normal School of La Rioja six years later and between 1907 and 1912 she served in the same position at the Provincial Normal "Alberdi" of Córdoba.

In parallel, she was Inspector of the Municipal Schools and dictated the chairs of Pedagogy and mathematics at the Normal School of the "Divine Teacher".

But her stay in Córdoba was difficult due to latent political interests and later because she was separated from her positions without a clear reason, so she moved to the Federal Capital.

There, for 5 years, she was the founding director of the "Roque Sáenz Peña" Normal School and of the "Domingo Faustino Sarmiento" Normal School No. 9.

The Argentine Model School

Since 1917 it was a stage in which Rosario Vera Peñaloza became more involved in the political sphere by being part of the current of democratic, socialist teachers who promoted popular education. They were also years in which he debated the role of women and used to advocate for the obtaining of social, political and civil rights.

In principle, she collaborated in the creation of the Escuela Argentina Modelo which she inaugurated in April 1918. Later she was an inspector of secondary, normal and special education from 1924 to 1926, the year in which she decided to retire for health reasons.

But his retirement marked the beginning of a period of travel throughout the country advising officials, neighbors and teachers, in which he developed plans and study programs, in addition to teaching courses, attending educational conferences and founding libraries.

He constituted the so-called Popular Education Societies together with Carlos Vergara and Elvira Rawson through which they questioned the bureaucratization of education and sought to eliminate the isolation of the public school that existed at the time.

In 1931 he created the Argentine Museum for the Primary School, which he had conceived as an institute for research and formulation of educational proposals.

Last years

In 1945, as part of his golden wedding anniversary with teaching, a commission was formed that received the tributes that came not only from Argentina but also from Chile, Uruguay and Peru. In an illustrated album she was declared by colleagues, former students, admirers and friends as the Teacher of the Nation.

A few months before his death in 1949, he designed and produced by hand a map of South America in relief that highlights the routes followed by the liberating expedition from San Martín to Chile and Peru. Installed in the Sanmartiniano Institute of the Federal Capital, he explained personally, to school delegations that visited him, the trajectory and the battles held there.

In La Rioja, on May 28, 1950, Rosario Vera Peñaloza died at the age of 77 due to advanced cancer. She had moved to the area to teach a course at Chamical.

In addition to the date on which the National Day of the Kindergartens and the Day of the Master Gardener are commemorated, she was honored with a postage stamp, a poem written by Félix Luna and turned into a zamba by Ariel Ramírez. Numerous schools bear her name throughout Argentina.

The Sanmartiniano institute awarded him a posthumous award for his "Patriotic Creed." The educator and disciple Martha Alcira Salotti published twelve works posthumously.

Contributions

Rosario Vera Peñaloza on an Argentine radio station. Source: Here

As a scholar and diffuser of the principles of Froebel and Montessori, Rosario Vera Peñaloza managed to adapt them to the Argentine reality and make them accessible to the entire population. He adapted didactic material with waste and took advantage of the resources that nature provided so that creativity in the classroom was displayed, always with scientific bases.

This pedagogue was one of the main promoters of the Initial level in Argentina and, together with Custodia Zuloaga and other educators, managed to register important advances in didactic planning, comprehensive training and current regulations.

His main contributions include giving the game a strategic value in kindergarten, as well as the use of the hands as an activator of brain function and an instrument for creativity.

It is also considered the main engine for the foundation of libraries and the museum premises in its country, in which it added regional elements, based on the teaching of geography. In them she taught the chair of folk studies for her teaching peers, with the purpose of making the native heritage known and maintaining the national character.

He was also a key character in promoting popular education, children's literature and in the use of new teaching techniques that he transmitted with conferences and courses throughout the country.

Plays

- I believe in the Argentine teaching profession and in its work; It is up to them, the teachers, to train the generations capable of keeping always lit the votive lamp that those who gave us Homeland left in our care, so that it never goes out in the Argentine soul and so that it is the lighthouse that illuminates the paths.

References

1. Vera de Flachs, MC "Rosario Vera Peñaloza a teacher who left her mark on the history of education in Argentina". History of Latin American Education Magazine 14 No. 18, (2012): pp. 19 - 38.
2. Rosario Vera Peñaloza. (2019, October 16). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Recovered from es.wikipedia.org
3. Flores, Luis (2009): «Rosario Vera Peñaloza: her life and her thoughts» Archived August 19, 2014 at the Wayback Machine, May 23, 2009 article on the La Rioja Cultural website. Mentions a biography published by El Ateneo (Buenos Aires).
4. Capone, G. (nd). Rosario Vera Peñaloza, an example teacher that endures over time. Recovered from mendoza.edu.ar
5. Moreno, V., Ramírez, ME, Moreno, E. and others. (2019). Rosario Vera Peñaloza. Recovered from Buscabiografias.com
6. Rosario Vera Peñaloza. (sf). Recovered from revisionistas.com.ar