This article, which is documentary in nature, focuses on moralising teaching in primary education in the 19th century, by analysing a school text, the member of the youth, politician and historian Francisco González Guinan. This school handbook deals with social flaws and ills, reflections of Venezuelan reality of the 19th century, which would have to be overcome by the luminous and virtuous side of the human being, in which values such as patriotism, cyvism, bullying or social behaviour would be cultivated through education. It is moralising teaching, which takes the form of moralising school texts, such as the adviser, the backbone of Venezuelan decimonic primary education; it is the inculpatation in the apprentice of moral codes and republican principles of coexistence, which civilise the practices and social forms of behaviour, the main purpose of the most elementary education.