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Resumen de The Reinvention of the New Education Movement in the Franco Dictatorship (Spain, 1936-1976

Jacques F.A. Braster, María del Mar del Pozo Andrés

  • During the Second Spanish Republic (1931¿1939) the Government identified many of its educational goals with those of the international movement of the New School. While not subscribing to any particular trends, the legal documents are filled with appeals to activism, vitality, work school and collaboration. Many teachers identified with and enthusiastically supported these ideas. However, other educators, those generally belonging to Catholic Associations, saw the New School as a movement that served as an international referendum for such ideas as religious neutrality or coeducation, introduced by the Republican government in primary schools and that was perceived by these groups as an important step in the `de-Christianization' of Catholic Spain. Once the Civil War (1936¿1939) was over, these same educators were commissioned to create a pedagogic body for the new Francoist legislation. In this article the different phases of the relationship of the New School movement with the so called `new Spanish pedagogy' are analysed. In the first phase (1936¿1949) the dominating characteristics were silence and rejection. Not only was the New School criticized but it was silenced and made invisible. It was even denied the name by which it was known worldwide. Concepts defended by New School such as interest, joy and activity were compared with the concepts of effort, pain and discipline, as the truly Spanish pedagogic alternative. The explicit condemnation that the Francoist pedagogues made of Rousseauan naturalism, the latest inspiration of the New School, was hidden behind this `war of terminologies'. This condemnation was in line with the ideas of the Papal Encyclical Divini Illius Magistri (1929). Another factor of rejection could be the twisted connections made between some of the socializing characteristics of the methodologies and Soviet communism. In the second phase (1950¿1962) the younger generation of Spanish pedagogues, those trained at the end of the 1940s and from whom publications on this trend had been withheld, initiated the reconstruction of the movement of New School. Having rediscovered it, they gave it an appreciation normally reserved for personal discoveries. However, not all its representatives were equally well known, nor were their educational theories accepted unconditionally. The pedagogues of the regime invented new interpretations of classic terms such as `activity', which were forerunners of new pedagogic tendencies. In the third phase (1963¿1976) there was an attempt to appropriate some of the prevailing elements of the pedagogic culture of the early decades of the twentieth century. Legal reforms and publications on education as well were impregnated with terms that were reminiscent of the New School. The great educational reform would culminate with the General Law of Education of 1970 which, although there are several ideas reminiscent of New School, we cannot claim to be even remotely inspired by this movement. The influence came through intermediaries. Personalized education, which provided the pedagogic-ideological foundation for this law, identified some of the tendencies of the New School as precedents, while others were completely silenced.


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