The Escuela de Artes y Oficios [Arts and Trades School] was in operation from 1867 to 1876, when it was closed for good. The school did not prosper for several reasons. In the first place, the government bodies (the national government, the sovereign state of Cundinamarca, and the municipality of Bogotá) did not honor their agreements to support the school. In the second place, the school’s required resources were never secured. And finally, there was a lack of political will to invite the European experts needed to teach trades, or to equip the labs and workshops and staff the school with teachers. Although nearly 300 students attended the school, the classes were of an entirely theoretical nature, and concentrated on remedying the deficiencies in basic reading and writing skills among young male students.
Two factors contributed to the closing of the Escuela de Artes y Oficios (that was attached to the Universidad Nacional). For one thing, it had been evolving into a sort of public school that was a far cry from the kind of institution that the elite classes had expected. The second factor was that the liberal attitudes (most prevalent in the capital city of Bogotá) that had equated progress with a technical education for the people had gradually fallen out of favor, and this idea was no longer seen as a good strategy for the development of the country. At the time, there was a growing preference for restricting a fine arts education to the children of landowners and of the middle classes, who were the majority in the national and municipal governments. Funds were cut off and that put an end to the teaching of arts and trades.
When this school closed, the Colombian government abandoned the attempt to teach arts and trades in the capital city and the states. No state university in Colombia subsequently created a program for this particular purpose. In 1886 this function was delegated to the Instituto Nacional de Artesanos [Nation Artisans Institute], a low-profile organization that taught reading and writing to an impoverished and ignorant generation of artisans with no connection to the university.
In 1867, during the administration of President Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera (1861−64 and 1866?67), the Colombian Congress created the Instituto Nacional de Artes y Oficios [National Institute of Arts and Trades]. In 1867, when the Universidad Nacional de los Estados Unidos de Colombia was created, the decrees that had established the Instituto Nacional de Artes y Oficios and two other schools were repealed. The University’s Escuela de Artes y Oficios [Art and Trades School] was in operation until 1876 in the Convento del Carmen in Bogotá. In 1876 the national government abandoned the Escuela de Artes y Oficios and focused solely on fine arts. In 1882, the Instituto de Bellas Artes [Fine Arts Institute] was created; it included the Vásquez, Guarín, and Arrubla Schools of Printmaking and Drawing in Bogotá. This project, however, did not come to pass, and the schools continued to function independently. The Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes [National School of Fine Arts] at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia was founded in 1886 (it is known today, in 2010, as the Escuela de Artes Plásticas [School of Visual Arts] at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia).