Educator and humanist from El Tocuyo. In 1863 he founded Colegio La Concordia, one of the most important schools in nineteenth-century western Venezuela. Teacher of Lisandro Alvarado, José Gil Fortoul, and other key figures of Venezuelan culture.
The teacher of El Tocuyo
Egidio Antonio Montesinos Canelón was born in El Tocuyo on September 1, 1832, the son of the independence hero Pedro Manuel Montesinos and Francisca Canelón. From an early age he showed a deep inclination toward letters and pedagogy, which would come to define his own life and that of several generations of Tocuyanos.
He earned his Bachelor of Philosophy in 1849 and devoted the following decades to teaching in El Tocuyo, giving classes in philosophy, history, geography, cosmography, and civics.
The founding of Colegio La Concordia (1863)
In 1863, in the midst of the Federal War, Montesinos founded Colegio La Concordia: a secondary school that would soon become one of the most prestigious in western Venezuela. La Concordia offered rigorous humanist training —Greek, Latin, rhetoric, philosophy, sciences— at a time when formal education was scarce outside Caracas.
Over its lifetime, La Concordia delivered as many as sixteen courses in philosophy —all personally taught by Montesinos— and graduated 474 students, several of whom would become decisive figures in Venezuelan culture:
- Lisandro Alvarado (1858-1929): physician, ethnologist, philologist.
- José Gil Fortoul (1861-1943): historian, sociologist, acting president under Gómez.
- Ramón Pompilio Oropeza: jurist and educator.
- Hilario Luna y Luna: man of letters; a parish bears his name.
- Carlos Yépez Borges, and many others.
Character and method
Montesinos was a man of austere principles. He hardly left his house: he lived devoted to his books, his students, and the grading of exams. His classes were demanding but stimulating, and his personal library —one of the most complete in interior Venezuela— was open to his disciples.
He sought neither university chairs in Caracas nor political office. He turned down honors and preferred dedication to the school he had founded. He was, in the strictest sense, a teacher by profession and by vocation.
Death and legacy
He died in El Tocuyo on July 26, 1913, at age eighty. Colegio La Concordia closed after his death: no one knew how, or wished, to continue the work at the level of its founder.
On July 24, 1925, an equestrian monument in his honor was inaugurated in the historic center of El Tocuyo, financed by public subscription —something unusual for a civilian educator. The project was led by former students as an act of collective gratitude. The monument remains one of the urban landmarks of El Tocuyo.
Historical importance
Egidio Montesinos represents the finest provincial humanism of nineteenth-century Latin America: the conviction that in an inland town one could train scientists, writers, and politicians of the highest caliber without having to emigrate to the capital. La Concordia was the successful experiment of that conviction, and Lisandro Alvarado —its most brilliant disciple— was its best argument.
Without Montesinos, nineteenth-century El Tocuyo would have been only an agricultural town. With him, it became one of the most important intellectual hubs of western Venezuela.