Cold War strategic priorities led the United States to establish an enduring military alliance with General Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain between 1953 and 1975. This article examines the educational diplomacy carried out by the US government during the 1960s and early 1970s to foster Spain's stable modernization through the training of…

This article aims to portray industrial workers' vocational training during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in Spain (1923-1930), based on the Industrial Training Act of 1924 and the Vocational Training Act of 1928. The programme was devised to meet the modernising expectations of a conventional society. The grounds for government interventionism…

This article deals with visual representations of children in social and natural science primary education textbooks from Spain and Portugal during the final years of dictatorship, transition to democracy, democratic consolidation, and democracy between 1965 and 1995. It explores ways in which children are addressed and made visible in social and…

In this article we attempt to explain how Spanish schoolteachers built their knowledge around Progressive Education and just how they assimilated these new teaching practices, a process we conceptualise as "appropriating the New". Our source consists of the 287 files presented by state schoolteachers from all of Spain as part of their…

The General Education Law was approved half a century ago. It was designed by Francoism to reform the educational system, adjusting itself to the liberal-developmental approach that Franco's regime followed in its last few decades. The oppression that the so-called "vernacular languages" were subject to during the former years of…

Soldier newspapers on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War constitute a source of around 500 publications, 228 of which are illustrated. This article is the result of a visual and textual analysis of these 228 publications. Our aim was to discover how photography of cultural and educational events was used in this type of press publication…

This article analyses the case of Rosa Sensat teachers' movement in Catalonia during the final years of Francoism and the transition to democracy in Spain (1965-1990). This movement was a key actor in education reform debates in that period. Based on the perspective of political process theory, the article focuses on the contextual, organisational…

Promoted by some of the most critical sectors of the education community, the history of the Spanish pedagogical renewal (19th and 20th centuries) shows all kinds of experiences representing an innovative, committed and transformative way to understand both pedagogical processes and the school. This article shows the final results of the…

In the mid-1970s, after the end of military dictatorships, Spain and Portugal experienced a transition to democracy that promoted the establishment of regimes committed to achieving gender equality in public and private life. Women saw significant advancements in education and employment rights, enabling them to have more job opportunities. Using…

Today, the term 'global' has become a pervasive description of universities that aim to alleviate their importance and reach. The global looks inherently big. By relating to a spherical shape it attributes size in two distinct ways: it signifies the comprehensive and extensive reach of a theme or issue as well as the spherical centrality of an…

The purpose of the paper is to develop the theory that structural or procedural changes in institutions precede changes in education in a society. It examines the development of pre-modern institutions in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the influences this had on growth in literacy rates within these states. Literacy rates in…

This article analyses the concept of the state as represented in primary school social science textbooks in Spain during the transition to democracy. The analysis of textbooks during this period has tended to focus on the importance of National Catholicism (Nacionalcatolicismo) or the technocratic vision in the framing of their representations.…

This article investigates the genesis of a new model of religious education in the history of Jews using as an example Jews in Galicia during its autonomous period (1867-1918). At that time, it became necessary to organize instruction in Mosaic religion in public schools. No relevant experience had been previously acquired, and the vast majority…

This article explains the approach to mass consumption developed in social studies textbooks in the early years of the transition to democracy in Spain. It begins by examining the way in which school textbooks represented consumer society and mass media in the late 1970s. This is followed by an in-depth explanation of the reasons that led the…

This article's purpose is to address a hitherto unexplored topic in the history of education: the story of the "Cátedras Ambulantes," officially referred to as "Misiones Pedagógicas" during the final years of the Franco dictatorship and the beginning of the transition to democracy (1966-1977). The study is based on a…