The Spanish Crown made a significant commitment to education in colonial New Spain. The first efforts of schooling in Mexico were friars’ evangelization of indigenous populations. “Educating the native population was a crucial justification of the colonizing enterprise, and that "criollo" (Spanish American) culture was encouraged as a vehicle for integrating” the indigenous. Fray Pedro de Gante established schools for indigenous in the immediate post-conquest years and produced pictorial texts to teach Catholic doctrine. All the mendicant orders in Mexico, the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, built churches in large indigenous communities as places of worship and to teach the catechism, so that large outdoor atriums functioned as classrooms. Elite indigenous lads were tapped for training as catechists and helpers to the priests, whose small numbers could in no way minister to large numbers of ordinary indigenous.