Introduction

On the last day of the school year an old teacher, called 'Prospero' by his students, sits beside a bronze statue in the classroom and gives them a farewell address. The statue represents Ariel, the airy spirit of Shakespeare's The Tempest, who stands for the noble part of the human spirit, reason, the sense of beauty and selfless ideals; against him stands the ugly monster Caliban, emblem of coarse appetite and utilitarianism. The teacher urges the youth of Latin America to cherish the ardour of youth and seek the full development of the personality, not to let specialised careers and the pursuit of wealth stifle the life of the spirit; democracy must rest on education and respect for excellence, or it will sink into the rule of mediocrity. He criticises the fashion, then spreading in Latin America, for blindly admiring and imitating the United States, which for all its astonishing achievements in wealth and efficiency, he argues, lacks spiritual height. This long essay in the form of an address shaped a whole generation of Latin American intellectuals and gave rise to what was called 'Arielism'.