This article, delivered as one of two keynote lectures at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Milan in September 2022, offers an example of an autosociobiographical approach to the history of education, in which the life story of the author is entangled with the collective movement of a generation of…

Numerous studies have analysed the relationships between the implementation of the railroad within a territory and the demographic, urban, or economic development in that territory. The aim of this study deviates somewhat to focus on the possible repercussions of the railroad line in terms of reducing illiteracy rates in Extremadura (Spain)…

In this article we attempt to explain how Spanish schoolteachers built their knowledge around Progressive Education and just how they assimilated these new teaching practices, a process we conceptualise as "appropriating the New". Our source consists of the 287 files presented by state schoolteachers from all of Spain as part of their…

The General Education Law was approved half a century ago. It was designed by Francoism to reform the educational system, adjusting itself to the liberal-developmental approach that Franco's regime followed in its last few decades. The oppression that the so-called "vernacular languages" were subject to during the former years of…

The aim of this paper is to analyse the social and economic implementation of the reform of industrial vocational training during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in Spain (1923-1930), based on the Industrial Education Statute of 1924 and the Vocational Training Statute of 1928. Framed within an international context affected by the consequences of…

The mechanisms of dissemination of the counting frames in the teaching of mathematics in Spain during the nineteenth century are studied. José Mariano Vallejo and Pablo Montesino proposed them in order to facilitate an arithmetic initiation based on intuition, following Pestalozzi's proposals. The diffusion channels considered were pedagogical…

Based on the potential of educational materials to forge and shape the collective memory, this article analyses the representations of the Francoist Hunger Years (1939-1952) in recent history textbooks for secondary schools by a wide range of publishers. The main thesis of the paper is that while there are textbooks that provide a complex…

Traditionally, the History of Education has come close to the reality of private and religious schools from eminently educational and pedagogical interpretative models. Despite the fact that these institutions perform educational functions, they must not hide their status as companies, which operate in an educational market that requires, for the…

The question "What does this have to do with everything else?" refers to ecological thinking. In this article, we use an ecological approach to explore the interrelationships between the incidence of the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, its trajectories and impacts on education. Our emphasis on children and their environment, as specific…

The growing multidisciplinary historiographic interest in the study of the misnamed "Spanish flu", which caused 50 to 100 million deaths in the world and between 260,000 and 270,000 in Spain, has not spread to the History of Education. The main objective of this article is to provide an initial approach to the analysis of certain aspects…

There is a strong ethical component to historical memory which means that no group should be left out. Hence the need to recover the voice of half the population, women, so often rendered invisible by the narrative. In more traditional education history this silence is even more apparent. University education museums, supported by the pertinent…

Before and during the era when mass elementary schooling took off, children populated classrooms in many roles and not only as learners. The traditional teaching situation was actually full of children in roles as instructors, inspectors, and helpers, among others. In this contribution, the dichotomisation of expected classroom roles, being a…

The study of secondary education teachers in nineteenth-century Spain has traditionally been undertaken from the perspective of specific individuals or high schools. However, national sources about this body of public servants have not been exploited in a systematic manner, thus impeding the attainment of aggregate perspectives. This paper…

Dewey's selective and moulding reception in Spain (1898-1936) was determined by the academic and professional "episteme" as "externationalisation mould". Dewey was translated by members of the bourgeois-reformist Institución Libre de Enseñanza mainly after 1925, as his thought didn't fit in their "episteme " and…

Soldier newspapers on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War constitute a source of around 500 publications, 228 of which are illustrated. This article is the result of a visual and textual analysis of these 228 publications. Our aim was to discover how photography of cultural and educational events was used in this type of press publication…