Els Estats Units, un model a Catalunya

Abstract

This article provides an in-depth study of the influence of the United States in the genesis of education, the Catalonian school and pedagogical renovation. We show how the main followers (Bardina, Homs, Palau and Vera, among others) of the classic North-American education ( ainly Emerson and Franklin) are defenders of the nationalising education or national pedagogy. The ensemble of both factors will lead to a liberal sense of public responsibility, since the relationship between the culture of the Unites States and Catalonia is not conservative. The United States will also have a notable influence on other ways of understanding society, since it is characterised by having been the cradle of Utopism, of experiments undertaken in conjunction with a Darwinian spirit; to say nothing of the presence of Pestalozzi, Scottish philosophy, spiritism and phrenology. All in all, and through a confluence with Catalonian interests, it generated an undeniable but barely acknowledged philo-americanism. This relationship took material form in the publication of books, journals, and, in a word, the transmission of certain characteristics of public education that helped to build and maintain an anthropological model based on what might be termed protestant virtues of work and everyday effort.