The Pedagogical Missions of the Second Republic

One of the most serious deficits that Spanish society has maintained since the last century has been educational and cultural. The high rates of illiteracy, the lack of educational infrastructure, the ignorance of the various arts, the scant interest in science, were all scourges that prevented the modernization of Spain and its inclusion in European standards.
The first The government that was truly interested in this problem was the republican government of 1931. The reformist program of the first biennium of the Second Republic had an impact on improving education and popular culture. To this end, it increased investment in the creation of schools and in the training of teachers; but more ingenious solutions were also carried out and we will cite the initiative of the Pedagogical Missions due to its relevance. They were approved when Marcelino Domingo was Minister of Public Instruction and their objectives were:

• Promote general culture through popular libraries, organization of readings, film sessions to get to know other peoples, musical sessions of choirs and orchestras, radio auditions, art exhibitions with circulating museums.
• Pedagogical orientation with visits to schools to learn about their situation with the subsequent celebration of a pedagogical week or fortnight and courses for teachers, in which they are shown or taught how to give classes to children and the materials they have.
• Development of civic culture. For this, meetings with democratic principles of modern peoples were held to review the structure of the state and its powers.

The project involved mostly teachers, professors, artists, students, writers, etc. Some of them were already personalities in their fields of creation, such as the poets Miguel Hernández or García Lorca, others will be later:Carmen Conde, María Moliner, Ramón Gaya, etc.

For the republican government, cultural development was an integral part of social justice and an instrument of liberation from oppression. In this regard, the words of García Lorca in the opening speech of a library in Fuente Vaqueros, his town, are a manifesto of the involvement of the intellectuals of the time in general, and of Lorca in particular, in the tasks of educational missions. In the same way, their blind trust is latent in the power of culture, of books, of wisdom in short, as a means of achieving freedom.

The experience was short-lived as the Conservative governments cut their budgets after 1935 and their action did not reach all the planned objectives. But its value as a project is still there.

The following presentation, author unknown, compiles the aforementioned speech. Next, a brief documentary introduces us to the task of the Pedagogical Missions.

Half Bread and a Book. Lorcahttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/85815476/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-1fv1ztz7nitmjcu8dd4z