Telling the history of education under Franco's regime from personal experience

Abstract

An autobiography, properly framed in its historical context, can tell us as much about a particular period of the past as a standard academic study. In fact, in recent years a number of works of this nature (autobiographies, memoirs, diaries) have appeared, often written by teachers, in which biography, memory and history are combined. This is the case of the book by Guillermo Castán, the subject of this article, Memoria y experiencia de la educación bajo el franquismo (1957-1972), a peculiar and inquisitive look at the experience of education (and, specifically, school institutions) under Franco's regime. The guiding thread is the author's personal educational trajectory, solidly framed in the Spanish historical course, from the mid-1950s to the beginning of the 1970s, in the last 20th century. Its content allows for an approach to and debate on subjects of great interest, such as education in the social context, with three basic referents (family, school, and street), fear as a fundamental component of the control exercised by the dictatorship or the emergence of social conscience and political commitment.