Formació professional, instrucció i adoctrinament a l'empresa Segarra (la Vall d'Uixó, Castelló) durant el franquisme = Professional training, instruction and indoctrination at the Segarra company (La Vall d'Uixó -Castelló-) within the Franco period

Abstract

In the context of the first decades of the Franco period, this article analyzes some of the paternalistic educative politics carried out in the working field of a shoes company based in La Vall d'Uixó, Castellon. In an atmosphere that mixed professional training with indoctrination, control and instruction, the employees of the company could benefit from different educative initiatives offered by the manufacture. La Escuela de Aprencices Segarra (Segarra Apprentice School) is one of them.
These training activities were located within the company paternalistic politics, in which masters, employees, instructors and trainees composed a «big family. Within this family and industrial amalgamation, the social and pedagogic program played an essential role due to beneficent and welfare reasons inspired in the Christian doctrine on one hand, and to lucrative interests, more mundane and typical of an enterprise, on the other hand.
In fact, it can be stated that everybody profited from it. On one side, the employees and their families could access to a social and educative system, which was only possible then for a few people and, on the other side, the masters achieved trained disciplined and moralized manpower. This was the real motivation that drove the shoes company to carry out an indoctrinating and controlling program.
The ideological features in which the educative program, that oriented every training action, was based, totally matched with the pedagogical pillars of the first Franco period. In this context, concepts like education, discipline, work, patriotism and religiosity were always on hand, being it very difficult to distinguish one from each other.
In conclusion, it can be said that these ideological and indoctrinating basis allowed the inhabitants of La Vall d'Uixó to benefit from various educative initiatives (apprentice school, library, School Enclosure, mutual benefit school, summer camps, cultural extension courses, etc.), as well as from social and assistance programs (accommodation, stewardship, clinic, canteen, etc.).