L'Institut d'Educació General de Prat de la Riba. Higiene i civisme (1414-1923)

Abstract

The Institute of General Education was conceived as an autonomous body for the hygienic, civic and moral education of adults. It was founded in May 1914 by Enric Prat de la Riba, the first president of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya, the Catalan administration, when this latter body had only just been formed. For the following five years the new entity would remain closed but in May 1918 Eugeni dOrs, general director of Public Instruction of the Mancomunitat, took over its management. He proposed the designation of a General Education Commission with eight members representing the choral societies, cultural associations, cooperative movements, wage-earning professional associations, health services, social journalism and promoters of the Catalan school and he entrusted Ramon Rucabado to organise a programme of action. The Commission was not formed until one year later. In 1920 Jaume Bofill i Mates replaced Eugeni dOrs at the head of the Commission and two more members were appointed. The executive secretaries of the Commission were, successively, Joan Crexells, Heladi Homs and Lluís Bertran i Pijoan. Featured among the programmes of the Commission were the popular conferences. In total, between the end of 1921 and the end of 1923, 203 talks were delivered in 76 towns with a total of 71,120 people attending. Only seven of the conferences were given in the city of Barcelona. The two main subject blocks were the history of Catalonia and questions of hygiene and health. The publication of one of the conferences, The Defence of the Family by Ramon Rucabado, enables an analysis of the dominant moral ideology in the Commission, an overly conservative conception in relation to the context of class struggle and the demand for social change of the period. Other noteworthy programmes include the subsidy for musical education in the choral societies, to avoid a drop in standards; the campaign against flies, and the defence of useful birds. The Institute of General Education followed the model of the Society of Popular Conferences of France and the University Extension Movement in Great Britain. It is found halfway between the old type of Economic Society of Friends of the Country, from the nineteenth century, and the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat from the times of the Civil War (1936-1939).