Educational Politics and School Practices: The Implementation of the 1945 Primary Education Act in the Classrooms

INTRODUCTION. This article analyses the influence of educational politics in the school practice during the first years of Francoism. We study the impact of some educational principles established in the 1945 Primary Education Act and in the 1953 national Syllabuses for Primary Education on the daily life of schools during the 1950's. METHOD. The article combines the historical method for the analysis of educational politics and the ethnographic method for the interpretation of school practices. The main source of documentation has been the collection of pedagogical reports archived in the Collection "Anselmo Romero Marin" preserved in the Museum "M.B. Cossio" from the Complutense University. RESULTS. The analysis that has been carried out allows us to detect several continuities with the curricular approaches of previous historical periods and with the methodological renovation of the 1930's. On the other hand, it does not seem that the educational legislation of the first Francoist period was very present in the daily school life, except for the most symbolic and ritualized aspects. This conclusion leads us to confirm that the history of the classroom is built from the empirical school culture developed by schoolteachers with which we cannot find any significant breaks despite the clear ideological changes observed in educational politics. DISCUSSION. A possible line of discussion in the historiographical debate about Francoism could arise from introducing the theoretical model of the "grammar of schooling" developed several years ago by Tyack and Cuban. The discussion might then focus on how far Francoist educational politics entailed a curricular and methodological break with the previous historical period. On the one hand we could state that educational practices are immune to political changes and, on the other hand we could say that they are dependent of the mentality of teachers and of their professional dynamics.