Comprehensive Educational Reforms in Spain: Past and Present

Abstract

The Franco regime deeply marked the educational system in Spain, and recent reforms need to be seen in the context of what happened during that period. During the first twenty years of Franco's rule, up to 1959, the consequences of war, poverty, and dictatorship for education were similar in kind and intensity to those for most other realms of social life. Public and private expenditure on education diminished, and the numbers of pupils fell or stagnated at every educational level. The new regime did not undertake any structural reform, but reinforced class distinctions, the ideological control of curriculum and discipline. As Puelles has put it (Puelles, 1980), education at the time was characterized by its Catholicism (compulsory religious education, the right of the Church to inspect educational establishments), it nationalism, its pedagogical and moral reactionariness (total rejection of earlier advances in organization and methods, prohibition of coeducation, education of girls for home life), and explicit élitism (private religious schools predominated at the secondary level, and they and the universities were geared to training a ruling élite drawn from the middle classes).