POLITICAL AGENDAS THROUGH POPULAR EDUCATION: MEXICO AND SPAIN IN THE THIRTIES

Abstract

During the 1930s many voices called for using popular education to remake societies in crisis, through reshaping popular culture and loyalties. International influences played a major part in shaping these agendas. This paper discusses the efforts of the Spanish Second Republic to achieve social transformation through education, and how this process had already been under way in Mexico for a decade, with mixed results. In both cases, invoking the authority of the State against the Catholic Church’s traditional role in education led to popular resistance to government schooling, including widespread violence and the ultimate frustration of the program. State monopoly of schooling, the paper suggests, is always a threat to freedom, especially when a powerful regime seeks to impose its ideological perspective.