Session Information
17 SES 14, Challenging Democracy Education as a Political Tool in the Conflict between Democracy and Totalitarianism, 1900-2000
Symposium
Contribution
In 1970 the Franco regime enacted the General Law of Education. The law was one of the dictatorship’s most ambitious attempts to cultivate a liberal image that would render legitimacy to its authoritarian political project. The law declared that its main aspiration was to democratize education. This ambition was manifested in the attempts included in the law to guarantee the equality of opportunities among students, to avoid imposing a unified pedagogical dogma on teachers, to respect the autonomy of schools etc. However this liberal text was published while the dictatorship was struggling for its survival accompanying its liberal gestures with the old mechanisms of political oppression. Growing groups of teacher’s criticized the shortcomings of the law as well as its application and offered their own projects for the democratization of Spanish society. In this paper I analyze the interaction between the regime’s educational policy and the teachers’ movement discourse, highlighting how both used the term democracy to refer to contradictory, distinct and sometimes overlapping meanings. This range of meanings serves me to illustrate the complexity of the concept of democratic education in Spain during its transition to democracy.
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