The New Education movement in the Franco dictatorship (Spain, 1936-1976): rejection, reconstruction and remembrance

Abstract

In this article, the different phases of the relationship between the New Education movement and 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 also silenced and made invisible. In the second phase (1950-1962), the younger generation of Spanish pedagogues, those trained at the end of the 1940’s, initiated the reconstruction of the New Education movement. Having rediscovered it, they gave it an appreciation normally reserved for personal discoveries. They invented new interpretations of classical 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, publications and the school practice were impregnated with terms that were reminiscent of the New School.