La escuela rural en Murcia durante la Segunda República, 1931-1936

Abstract

The government of the Second Spanish Republic, established in in the elections of April 12, 1931, proposed and approved from the beginning a series of reforms leading to the modernization and progress of the country. Education, a key element of social development, became a vital theme of the republican renovation. It was necessary to create schools, especially in towns and small villages where there were no schools, to increase the number of teachers and to dignify their figure, both in terms of training and material resources, to reduce the country's high illiteracy rates, encourage school attendance, renew teaching methods and include new content aimed at developing a democratic and civic conscience, modernizing the educational administration by giving new life to the inspectorate and promote complementary institutions to the school such as canteens, cloakrooms, libraries, colonies and the celebration of Pedagogical Missions, all with the aim of raising literacy rates in the country and reducing the sharp contrasts between rural and urban areas. From the local space and with continuous and constant references to the national space, special attention is paid to the real repercussions that for the Murcian rural school could have had the republican educational policy in the three stages in which the Government was divided during which varied orders and decrees were dictated whose objective was focused, with greater or lesser intensity, depending on the character of each party in power and the budgets they had, towards the renewal of the educational institution. The methodology followed is based on an exhaustive analysis of archival sources, political, legislative and statistical sources, as well as publications of the republicanic period historic, without losing sight of the vast and rich legacy that exists on this stage of the history of education in the works already carried out. Review, interpretation, synthesis and exposition of the study sources, as parts of the historical work, support the methodological foundations of this thesis. The objectives are to analyze the political dispositions related to schools and the new educational organization approved by the central government from April 1931 to July 1936 and to observe their impact on rural areas; consider the continuity in the reformist approaches and objectives towards rural schools and their teachers during the different stages of republican governments; to analyze from primary and secondary sources the pedagogical conceptions of rural schooling; to examine what orientation, both ideologically and methodologically, the Ministry of Public Instruction a tried to give to teaching in rural áreas; to analyze the reality of rural schools during the 1930's, taking into account the number of existing schools, their state and conditions, the situation of the teachers who served them, and organizational and curricular issues, in Spain and in the province of Murcia. So, after the analysis of each of the aspects mentioned above, it can be concluded that even with difficulties, the republican work in education during the first years of government can be described as revolutionary because it meant an important transformation of the main aspects affecting education and specifically education and schools in rural areas of Murcia, laying the foundations of a model of school organization and educational democratization that, after the years of dictatorship, would be, in some ways, a reference for the configuration of the new educational system from 1970 onwards.