Exploring new concepts of popular education: politics, religion and citizenship in the suburban schools of Madrid, 1940–1975

Abstract

During the Franco period, one of the objectives of the government was the so‐called “regeneration of the suburbs”. Education was, among the solutions proposed, the one discussed most frequently. This article hopes to show that, during these years, a multifaceted model of popular education arose which could be called “suburban education”, because it acquired some peculiar characteristics for adaptation to this specific spatial and social context. The agencies of education in the Franquista era clearly acted in a different and sometimes contradictory way in the suburbs as compared with what they said and did in other contexts of Madrid. Starting from this initial premise, the article will focus on three topics. First, it will determine the way in which the spatial growth of the suburbs interrelated with the expansion of schools. Second, it will identify the models of “popular suburban education” tried out by the three great powers of the Franco regime, the State, the Church and the Falange, in the different suburban spaces. Finally it will look profoundly at the role that these agencies of education played in what some town planners call “the urbanisation of the suburbs”. By this term is meant the achievement of economic, cultural and political independence, which began to take place at the end of the 1960s.