Patriotic instruction in school notebooks during Franco’s regime: Hispanic Heritage Day

Abstract

These days, using classroom notebooks as a source for historiography and document study has become part of a new movement which started at the end of the 20th century, and which has allowed us to reconstruct School History from new perspectives. Notebooks are like a written fingerprint of what happened inside the classrooms, and consequently, they offer a unique source to interpret our school culture. This article will analyze the teaching practice carried out by primary school teachers during Franco’s regime and will focus on the patriotic instruction offered in a topic that was considered a major one: the Hispanic heritage and its celebration day, taking into account the parallelism between the teaching practice carried out in the classroom by the teacher and reflected in the notebooks, and the underlying discourse which underneath this proposal reinforced the nationalist rationale through either legislative action with the 1945 Act for Primary Education or theoretical discourse. This article will focus on understanding which concepts are transferred to boys and girls during Franco’s regime about the Hispanic Heritage Day and with what purpose, especially those from state schools located in western and central areas of the Iberian Peninsula. The main source studied comes from the school notebooks collection in the CeMuPe at the University of Salamanca.

Key words: School notebooks, school culture, teaching practice, patriotic instruction, Franco’s regime.