Images that portray, challenge, and refuse: Visual content and education in Francoiist Spain, 1939-1975

Abstract

The political turbulences that affected Spain throughout the twentieth century were marked by a discursive radicalism in education. Different ideologies brought forth different educational agendas that influenced not only how the population should be educated but also how it should live. These agendas were expressed through movements, speeches, and propaganda, among other educational practices. They were so incessant that the recent history of Spain can be read through an analysis of its educational institutions. The historical sources help us understand the logic behind these discourses and the differences between the ideologies at play: democratic, authoritarian, and anarchist. They can help us to see, for example, how social inequalities affected access to schools because of the overrepresentation, in newspapers, newsreels, or professional journals, of elitist schools, while the common school and the schools in the slums were little or not at all represented. In this essay, we present our research on the question of how social inequalities were fought against or upheld by different educational policies in twentiethcentury Spain. As sources, we have used both documentaries produced by the Francoist regime and documentaries produced against the Francoist regime, contrasting their representations of schools with historical information based on written documents or oral history. By comparing the filmic representations and the actual policies, we can see the gap between reality and fiction. Using visual sources, such as documentaries, and analyzing one specific dimension, such as the visual representation of social inequalities, provides an ideal opportunity to explore the differences not only between reality and fiction but also among the different official (government) proposals on education.