«History of Education & Children’s Literature», X, 1 (2015), pp. 361-367 ISSN 1971-1093 (print) / ISSN 1971-1131 (online) © 2015 eum (Edizioni Università di Macerata, Italy)
National identity, civic values and school textbooks in Spain: La Enciclopedia cíclico-pedagógica and El libro de España (1931-1957) Xavier Tornafoch Yuste Faculty of Education, Translation and Human Sciences, University of Vic (Spain)
[email protected] Isavena Opisso Atienza Centre de Digitalization, University of Barcelona (Spain)
[email protected]
ABSTRACT: There has recently been bitter controversy in Spain over the school subject of «Education for Citizenship». However, there is nothing new in the opposition of moral or civic models that sought to forge a national identity in schools. Because of the proximity in time and the coexistence in the same state and the same historical period of the Second Republic (1931-1939) and the early years of the Francoist regime (1939-1957) it is interesting to compare the textbooks of this period. Both regimes coexisted during the three years of civil war (1936-1939) in the clash on the battlefield and in the classroom. They preached «citizens’ values» drawing from different sources; textbooks aimed at children of the same age who shared citizenship but lived in different states, one liberal and democratic and the other authoritarian and nationalistic. Our proposal with our article is to review, analyse and compare two of the textbooks used for this purpose: La Enciclopedia cíclicopedagógica and El libro de España. EET-TEE KEYWORDS: Textbook; Civics; Citizenship Education; Nationalism; Francoist Regime; Spain; XX Century.
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Introduction It has been testified by the controversies that have occurred in recent years in Spain around the school subject «Education for Citizenship», that the transmission of explicit values in the school has been of paramount importance1. In fact, this aim to inculcate certain social or cultural patterns of behaviour is present at the very origins of the educational institutions. States and political and social regimes that dominate them in every time period aim to generate a national consensus with the aim of improving social cohesion. In our time, it has been social cohesion that has strongly arisen as a concept. This official discourse, which has received fierce opposition from enemies (including the church) in the name of tradition or the people’s common sense2, was intended to unite most of society around a national project supported by a series of shared values emerging from the Spanish Constitution and from the framework of formal freedoms and the derived civic obligations. The Spanish school system, thus born in the first half of the 19th century as a model planned to suit a liberal state characterized by its rigidity, religiosity and centralism3, and almost unchanged until the 1970s, is now dealing with the need to ‘renationalise’ and ‘integrate’. This new juncture has generated and continues to generate conflict, particularly taking into account the demands of the peripheral nationalisms (mainly the Catalan and Basque) that are determined to maintain and extend their own school project, not through the Spanish language and culture, but rather from their own languages and cultures. However, the contrast of moral and civil models in school is not new. In the same time period and owing to their coexistence in one state at the same time, it is interesting to counterpoise the textbooks of the period of the Second Republic (1931-1939) and the early years of the Francoist regime (1939-1957). Both regimes coexisted during the three years of civil war (1936-1939), and they confronted each other not only on the battlefield, as we will see, but also in the classrooms. They preached ‘consensus’ and ‘cohesions’, by drawing from different sources. In both cases, they made textbooks addressed at children of the same age who shared citizenship despite living in different states, one liberal and democratic and the other authoritarian and nationalist. However, the civic and moral values that were mainly proposed were very different in most questions. The items that had to configure the “national identity” were not the same. Contrary to what happens today, that society was not divided by 1 F. Jáuregui, La decepción: crónica amarga y secreta de cuatro años de crispación, Barcelona, Debate, 2007; C. Fernández Liria, P. Fernández Liria, L. Alegre Zahonero, Educación para la ciudadanía: democracia, capitalismo y estado de derecho, Madrid, Akal, 2007. 2 A. Grimaldos, La Iglesia en España, 1977-2007, Barcelona, Península, 2008, pp. 219-244. 3 J. Mainer Baqué, La erección del sistema educativo en España: de la crisis del modelo liberal al fracaso del reformismo liberal-socialista de la Segunda República, «Revista de Andorra», n. 11, 2011, pp. 33-55, in particular p. 37.
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the geographical origin of the citizens, but was a fragmented society due to the very rigid social classes and the ancestral linguistic and regional belongings. In this context, and although it was a concept that was not used then, the public powers also needed to generate ‘social cohesion’.
1. The general framework of the textbook in the first third of the twentieth
century
The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1939) established the rule of a single textbook for each subject, in order to fight the textbook freedom considered by the authorities of the time as inappropriate for primary and secondary school, because, as they agreed, the intellectual maturity of the students would not allow them to understand the subjects by themselves4. The unifying goal of the authoritarian state of Primo de Rivera, which also proposed to attend other problems such as the excessive price of the books or their excessive length, becomes a reality, but not without considerable difficulties5. In the textbooks, the dictatorial state did not contemplate the linguistic and territorial diversity, or any other ethical conception that failed to take into account the church’s position. However, General Primo de Rivera, and with him the Spanish monarchy embodied by Alfonso XII, fell from power in the early 1930s. The desires for Spanish citizenship were soon materialized with a new republican regime that placed education at the heart of its political discourse from the outset. The republican authorities had to work in both directions. First of all, the new republican state would work to eradicate the ‘perpetual ignorance’ of Spanish people; secondly they had to consolidate the new republican values (tolerance, cultural and linguistic diversity, secularism, rationalism). In this context, the role of the textbook had become very important. The old textbooks didn’t serve any more, and new scholarly literature had to be promoted, a literature which took into account firstly the pedagogical issues that had traditionally been neglected and that also contemplated the transmission of civil and moral values to guide the behaviour of the citizens of the new republic state. In order to achieve these objectives, a series of actions were launched that included specific rules for editing manuals and organizational changes in the school structure6. The first 4 M. de Puelles Benítez, Política escolar del libro de texto en la España contemporánea, «Avances en Supervisión Educativa», n. 6, June 2007, (accessed: April 3, 2012). 5 Ibid. 6 P. Villalaín García, El libro de texto en la Segunda República: una regulación entre el control y la libertad, «Contribuciones a las Ciencias Sociales», febrero 2011 (accessed: April 2, 2012).
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decision from the radical-socialist government was to give up the policy of the single textbook promoted by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship to recommend works by the Consejo de Intrucción Pública, which would be included in the list of recommended texts for their scientific and pedagogical quality and also for their editorial quality, as the ministry felt that many of the books circulating in the schools at the time were of very poor quality. The way of supplying textbooks did not change initially with the arrival of the right wing forces in power in 1933, but the recommended textbooks were no longer the same. In 1935, a ministerial decree determined the single textbook, just as had happened during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. Finally, with the coming of the Popular Front into power in February, 1936, the regulations that imposed the single textbook were turned over and there was a return to the recommendations of the Consejo de Instrucción Pública based on their scientific and pedagogical quality. The books included in the ministry’s list had to previously be declared of public utility. In Catalonia, as soon as the Estatut d’Autonomia was approved (1932), the Government acted similarly with the school textbooks in Catalan, offering a range of readings to choose from7. With the victory of Franco’s rebels and the establishment of a totalitarian regime in Spain in 1939, which came to power in 1936 in the areas of the Peninsula where the armed uprising triumphed on 18th July, there was a return to the old educational policies offering a leading role to the Catholic Church and a persecution of linguistic and cultural differences and ended with the secular moral and ethical rationalism that the Second Republic had put forward. The three-year civil war (1936-1939) that followed the putsch of General Franco interfered with republican regime’s school projects, as it had to allocate the few resources available primarily to the war effort. Despite the difficulties, the field of schoolbooks maintained the same criteria, although the republican authorities in Madrid and the regional authorities in Barcelona insisted on close supervision of the nature of the books that students used in their learning, discarding any textbook that didn’t agree with the civil values of the Republic. The area under Franco’s control immediately returned to the single textbook and strict control was imposed on academic materials. In 1937, the compulsory use in every school was decreed of a textbook called El libro de España, a textbook that summarizes the ‘patriotic values’ of Franco’s Spain.
7 J. González-Agàpito, S. Marqués i Sureda, El libro escolar en catalán, in A. Escolano (ed.), Historia ilustrada del libro escolar en España. Del Antiguo Régimen a la Segunda República, Madrid, Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 1997, pp. 549-577.
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2. Josep Dalmau’s Enciclopedia Cíclico-Pedagógica
This is one of the manuals that was used during the Republican period, and that had been declared of public utility by the Generalitat de Catalunya. The edition belonged to Editores Dalmau Carles Pla, a publisher’s founded in Girona by the renowned teacher Josep Dalmau Carles8, a former head of the Grup Escolar de Girona, which was very popular in this provincial capital. It is an encyclopaedic text written in Spanish that aims to offer students a scientific and educational journey through all the basics; from language to history and geography, mathematics and biology. At the end of the text three sections are included that are intended to directly affect the education of the future citizens of the Republic: one about Law, another on Social Education and the last about Civic Morality. Although the text is steeped in rationalism and scientism, it is in this final part of the Enciclopedia Cíclico-Pedagógica that the main features of the republican ethic to be transmitted to children becomes evident. The chapter on law sets out the legal constitution of the Republic State regarding the rights and duties of citizens, state organization, powers of the local councils, justice, public finances, legislation, military service, labour legislation and foreign relations. Finally, there is a lesson devoted to «our duties», which refers to the cultivation of intelligence and not falling into bad habits, and the dignity of labour. The corollary of this lesson clearly says, «To what rule do we have to adjust our acts. We must always adjust them to doing good». The chapter that refers to social education mentions all those behaviours considered beneficial for better coexistence. It speaks of urbanity («to maintain friendly relations of harmony with our peers») hygiene, studies, moral obligations, duties to the family and to the Spanish homeland («we have to love our homeland as our second mother, we must work for its glorification, and, if necessary, it is our duty to sacrifice our tranquillity, our goods and even our lives for it») and the duties of courtesy with friends, at school, at home and in the public sphere. Most of these issues are again discussed in the chapter on civic morality. From the beginning it is clear that discerning between good and evil is something that is not only related to religion, but that there is a neutral social morality that tells men how they should behave with other individuals. It talks about the rights and duties of Spaniards, the foundations of law and morality, the laws and justice and the value of work. The citizens’ duties in social, family and individual aspects are reviewed. There is even a lesson devoted to the duty to preserve the environment. Finally, the text recalls that «the citizens must obey the republican government, the laws that are enacted and contribute to ensuring order, employment and peace in our country». As we have seen in this school text from 1939, the republican authorities promoted educational texts in the line of the major changes proposed, and which 8
S. Asso Coll, Biografia del Mestre Josep Dalmau Carles, Girona, Papers on Demand, 2007.
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coincided with the educational ideology from which they drew (the Institución Libre Enseñanza and the programs of Spanish socialism): the application of the principle of non-confessional religious development, the development of the principle of respect for student awareness and the effective achievement of teaching as the backbone to their work. We should add the desire to make citizens of the new Republic, which was intended to be modern, rational and tolerant9.
3. El Libro de España
This is a textbook imposed by the Francoist regime after 1937; it was an old text dating from 1928 that was compulsory during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Francoism adapted it to the new circumstances, emphasizing, as was predictable, the ‘heroic’ events of the Civil War, the origin of the legitimacy of General Franco’s power. This is a manual that comes through the adventures of two orphans, Gonzalo and Antonio, in Spain. The two children, expatriated in an undetermined country, return to the country after the war. On their wanderings, which would bring them to the Basque Country, Aragon, Andalusia, Castile, Santander, Galicia, the Valencian coast and Catalonia, the entire cosmovision unwinds that Franco wants to transmit to the new generations. Thus there are the most common clichés of the traditional Spain: the preponderance of religion, the Christian martyrs, the writers and painters of the Golden Age, the monumental Escorial, and the importance of the army and the ‘civilizing’ work of the Spanish Empire. An ‘eternal’ Spain constantly associated with the New Spain emerging from the civil war, without going through the years of the Republic, which become dominated by an anti-Spain ‘break’. Alongside the traditional glorias patrias will be placed the martyrs of the Crusade, first of all General Franco, followed by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish Falange, Onésimo Redondo, one of the founders of Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (JONS), General Moscardo, etc. The pedagogical ideas of the text, contrary to the republican, highlight the main values of exhorting and intolerant patriotism, obedience, territorial uniformity, sacrifice and the sexism. Franco’s regime aimed to integrate Spaniards in a single united nation; therefore it imposed pedagogy of militancy and will, whose main objective was to renationalize and Christianize the State10.
9 J. González-Agapito, S. Marquès, A. Mayordomo, B. Sureda, Tradició i renovació pedagògica, 1898-1939. Història de l’educació. Catalunya, Illes Balears, País Valencià, Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2002, pp. 443-444. 10 A. Mayordomo (ed.), Estudios sobre la política educativa durante el franquismo, València, Universitat de València, 1999, pp. 42.
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The instructions from the ministry of Educación Nacional to the teachers and inspectors, the texts that were imposed, as well as the educational and political discourses, all went in the same direction. The cohesion that the Francoist regime preached was imposed in a rapid return to the past. In a few years, from the fall of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, the school and the textbooks it used were asked to build two national consensuses (absolutely discordant and confronting): one to generate adhesion to the Spanish Republic, and the other to generate adhesion to Franco. Against a backdrop of political and social turmoil, two educational models are confronted: one that embodies the Enciclopedia cíclico-pedagógica (based on rationalism, scientism and respect for the law) and the other El libro de España (militant, authoritarian, sexist and Catholic). The latter of the two was finally imposed as a result of the military victory. This is when the history the Francoist school, a faithful continuation of the centralized, denominational and classist school system created in the early nineteenth century by the birth of the Spanish liberal state, took over.
