Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain by Anna Kathryn Kendrick

Abstract

Reviewed by: Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain by Anna Kathryn Kendrick Pamela Beth Radcliff Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain. By Anna Kathryn Kendrick. Oxford, UK: Legenda Press, 2020. ix + 305 pp. Cloth $99, paper $12.50. Humanizing Childhood explores the debates and practices surrounding the emerging discipline of the study of childhood in early twentieth-century Spain. Linked to the transnational education reform movement in Europe and the United States, artists, poets, educators, and philosophers in Spain developed new frameworks to understand the "world of the child" in order to guide children to their full human potential. On one hand, children served as an inspiration to avant-garde artists and poets; on the other hand, educators debated how best to intervene in their development. The over-arching theme of "paedology," or child studies, was the focus on the "whole child" and their role in the individual process of "humanization" through their phenomenological interaction with the world. The book provides a welcome addition to the relatively undeveloped field of the Spanish history of childhood and will be of comparative interest to scholars working on the reconfiguration of childhood and education reform movements in the twentieth century. One of Kendrick's main themes is to situate the Spanish case in a transnational context while exploring the national roots of new ideas about childhood and education. Spaniards absorbed the broader scholarship on holistic education through the translation of texts and visits to observe practices in other countries. For example, translated editions of Freud's works appeared in the Revista de Occidente after 1922, while the main text on Gestalt therapy was published in 1926. Maria Montessori's translated work appeared in Spanish in 1916, and the almost three dozen Montessori schools established in Catalonia by the 1930s were crucial to the movement's globalization. Montessori herself was first invited to speak in Barcelona in 1913 and served as director of Spain's Montessori Institute from 1918–21. At the same time, Kendrick does not paint a simplistic portrait of a "peripheral" nation accessing "advanced" Western culture. Spain had its own bifurcated humanistic tradition, a Catholic version and a secular version embodied in the influential Institute for Free Education (ILE), established in the late nineteenth century, as well as in Spain's anarchist philosophical [End Page 165] tradition. The ILE was influenced by the German philosophical movement of the nineteenth century called Krausism, which proposed a holistic approach to human nature that integrated mind, body, and spirit. The ILE tradition of secular humanist education as the key to social reform, modernization, and national development culminated in the Second Republic of the 1930s. Republican leaders ascribed almost mystical powers to education and invested major resources into reforming and expanding the country's educational infrastructure and disseminating culture through the touring theater troupes of the "pedagogical missions." One of the virtues of the book is to demonstrate the broader dissemination of these ideas through tacking back and forth between well-known figures like Ortega y Gasset and unknown individuals like teacher Margarita Aranda, who founded an open-air school in Madrid in the late 1920s. On the other hand, I would have liked to have seen more acknowledgement of the tension between these "universal" theories of childhood development and the deep class, regional, and religious divisions that structured Spanish society in the 1930s. Kendrick employs the Krausist trinity of mind, body, and spirit to structure the three parts of the book, each of which contains two chapters exploring one aspect of these concepts from the perspective of debates about childhood development and education. The first section, on the mind, explores how educators, psychologists, and poets theorized children's mental learning process, drawing on Gestalt therapy and "globalization theory" in the first chapter and on poets' fascination with childhood and children's writings in chapter 2. The poetry chapter provides a good example of the circularity of the debate, in which avant-garde poets sought inspiration from children as "pre-verbal muses" while educators developed poetry, literature and theater adapted for children. Part two, on the body, focuses on how "new" biological concepts of childhood development through tactile interaction with the world were...