OBJECT OF STUDY
This work is part of a larger research project. The objective of the project is to analyze the functions of the family in the process of institutionalization of the liberal state. It is about knowing the place that goes to the family in relation to the State or the political, in relation to the social structure and society, and in relation to the individual.
Here I study the contents of public education on the role of the family, for now I only stop at primary school. It is a moment in which the institutionalization of education begins in Spain, picking up the fundamental theoretical contributions of a new pedagogy.
The ideology that is imposed on the Spanish political landscape, and that will design all the primary education plans applied in the period, will be conservative liberalism, doctrinaire liberalism or moderatism, which unfolds under the decisive influence of French doctrine. The theoretical corpus of moderantism lies in the critique of national sovereignty and the natural law theory of the social pact. Among others, the universality of political and civil rights is disdained, the abstract concept of freedom that the democratic groups understand, because they think it encourages individualism. According to the moderates, whose main theorists are Antonio Alcalá Galiano and José Donoso Cortés, the political structure of a constitutional monarchy must be a reflection of its social structure, which is why it governs and decides who has economic, social and government power: mainly the class half. The government is responsible for the different segments of the bourgeoisie and of each social power, for this they need a differentiated representation in Cortes, the bicameralism, in a game of balances of power of advancement and permanence, which is the same: the Congress and the Senate. The right of veto of the monarch over the Cortes responds to this search for a moderating power. This balance of political powers, a counterweight of powers from their concern to combine authority with freedom, is the secret of stability.
Similar to this political structure, in the civil society the moderate party wants to favor spaces of non-political freedom against the power of the State, to avoid what they believe is an unlimited power of the government: tyranny, that is the logical evolution of a democratic or absolutist government, which lack the counterweights of representative government. They are normative freedoms with rigidity, but without the direct control of the State. The election of the moderates by municipal administrative autonomy, compared to the federative power of the municipality of the progressives, is an example of these spaces of freedom, such as freedom of thought and teaching, philanthropic and instructive societies, are examples of the freedom of the socialized individual against state power, as well as the protection of the right of property and personal security, or the protection of the domestic and private
The hypothesis of the project is that the Spanish liberal state will create strategies to get new behavioral patterns in the town -and by extension, but subsidiary, in the rest of social classes-, moralizing it. The State wants to reconstruct the customs of the popular class, to make it assimilable to the new political system and its social structure. And most importantly, the liberal state will do so mainly through the family, without weakening or shielding its preexisting structure, but giving it a moral education, reasonably more organic power or economic autonomy, and a moral autonomy, so that these groups do not give way. before Carlism, and condition the liberal State. With the public education of the liberal State, it aims to give the people a moral education, the method they see most modern and effective to avoid the detachment of individuals, individualism: tyranny.
METHODOLOGY, SOURCES AND ANALYSIS PROCESS
The huge amount of documentation in public education suggested I start the project out there. Having also a documentary, institutional unit, made the work much easier. The initial exploration in political thought did not give me encouraging results, due to the tremendous dispersion of documents, particularly because I did not have enough theoretical tools to question the sources. This work has finally given me a conceptual magma on family, moral philosophy and pedagogy, political philosophy that I have taken advantage of now, in the subsequent phases of my project, with good results.
The chosen periodization was from the reading of the most prestigious historians of education, who situate these years as those of theoretical, institutional and methodological formation of public education, a period that is solidified in the Moyano Law of 1857.
Why start with primary education ?. First of all, the obvious: avoid a documentary flood. It is the first opportunity in which the new State undertakes an extensive project to the whole territory and social spectrum of political, moral, hygienic and intellectual formation of the population. It is also the first time that the liberal state is preparing to reshape its public assistance in the only way that it believes then possible: with the education of the masses. The first time that, with the formulation of universality of primary elementary education, Spanish liberalism makes the first attempt to intervene in the general of families, in the private sphere.
Known the reference bibliography of political thought and history of education, I soon began to compile the legislation of public education. La Colección of decrees concerning public instruction, the Boletín Oficial de Instrucción Pública (1841-1847), the Diario de Sesiones de Cortes (1836-1845) and la Gaceta de Madrid (1834-1836) gave me everything I used in this legislation, apart from all the official regulations of primary schools and teacher training colleges. I organized all legislative projects and teaching laws from 1834 to 1845.
With this documentation I wrote down the subjects, the institutions that managed the primary schools (municipios), little more; but the legislative preambles gave me very useful surprises for the job: the reasons for these initiatives, the political arguments and the exclusively instructive ones. These sources allowed me to outline, discretely for the moment, the political reasons of the legislators.
To complete the whys of this legislation, if the most important thing was to instruct intellectually or not, I turned to political economists, who formed philanthropic and economic societies, advising governments on public policies. He had located references of the economists Jean Baptiste Say and Joseph Droz in the bibliographies recommended by the Boletín Oficial de Instrucción Pública. I could conclude that the civic-political intention of the legislators was completely axial in these plans: education was thought of as a system for citizens, and all inhabitants, to assimilate the new institutions.
The content of the civic and political education of legislators and political economists, asked me to study definitively the “moral education”. This new education deliberately fled from the purely political formation of the education plan of the Constitution of 1812, inspired by the revolutionary laws French, which according to lawmakers had not slowed down further revolutions. They discovered that, in order to teach political education in schools, even to make intellectual education viable, they must inevitably create a moral basis in the people, feasible because they already had the capacity for reasoning. This civic-political education was composed of basic living elements, which the individual had to accept voluntarily, in a regime of liberties it was no longer possible to simply indoctrinate.
I consulted the Reglamentos de Escuelas. There I observed the content of the subjects, stopping in moral education. The school was named a substitute for family education of the popular class: family education was an accumulation of moral teachings that -from the educational thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau- generated the family by nature; but the family of the popular classes did not generate this moral education, due to multiple factors that hindered their morality.
To discern these coexistence elements I went to contemporary moral philosophy. The key concept: the “moral autonomy” of the individual, considered the main purpose of public education. In the words of Immanuel Kant, the child had to assume, little by little, rationally, without coercion and imposing on himself, the duties he has with his first community, family and then school, to become integrated into society.
Thinkers like Kant, Rousseau or John Locke, of course pedagogues like Johann Pestalozzi, Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, spread in Spain by the pedagogue Pablo Montesino, believed that in the family was born the first morality of the individual, the “natural feelings” or ” filial love “, created by the love of the mother. It was the first training on duties and rights with respect to other people: self-control, industriousness, respect for social and institutional authority, which were received in the family. The school only had to protect these feelings, and prevent their deterioration.
Then I analyzed, from the regulations and manuals of schools, the content in moral education of the educational procedures: of the applied pedagogical systems -the simultaneous and the Lancasterian-, the order system, the distribution of time, the prizes and punishments, the children helpers and inspectors, physical education and I could see the perfect match with the moral philosophy studied.
Finally we had to see the impact that this education was expected to have on the family, the possible moralization of the family. The pedagogical work of Laureà Figuerola, Joseph Marie de Gérando, Antonio Gil de Zárate and Elisabeth C. P. de Meulan (Madame Guizot) gave me clues: it was to separate the child from the village family environment and educate it morally. With regard to entering directly into the family, the inspectors and teachers were only given advice to the parents, so that they would fulfill their parental moral obligations: to educate the child. The inspectors and teachers were very limited: they could not legally obligate the parents to school their child. In practice, the moral education of the family ended up being secondary, but it was hoped that the child, with his reformed behavior, would influence by contrast to the parents. Another strategy to educate the family was to avoid total gratuity, to make parents pay a minimum for two reasons: so that they learned to save (influencing their ways), and the reminder that payment impelled children to attend school.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
In the hypotheses I suggested that the State wishes to correct the customs of the people so that it assimilates the new political system. Educators pretend to educate the popular classes politically and patriotically, but this is more typical of the plans of 1812. Since 1834 the educational norms want to protect the “conservative principles of society”: civic education will avoid any exclusively political form. Two innovations explain it. In this legislation, public education is emancipated from the management and direct control of the State, thanks to the freedom of education, the independence -unpolitically, only manager- of the municipality, which is responsible for primary school, we also have the freedom to teach in the private school. The other innovation is that the family will represent a space of immunity and freedom before the State, balancing the possible despotic access of the constitutional monarchy, a symbolic space of permanence and rootedness in society, but without relation to the other counterweights in power, being the family where the individual learns the first moral duties. These innovations combine and feed each other.
The family is the first generator of moral autonomy in the individual, freedom, as well as assimilation of the permanence in the social body itself, public education has to create and prolong this work, in addition to enlarging the cohesion of the family by promoting in children filial love. It is considered that, for the popular classes, the school is the only moral educator, that is why it is important. The school, discontented and explicitly, will remove children from the village almost all day of the immorality of their family life and social environment.
The government almost does not intervene in the decisions of the family, neither to educate it nor to inculcate to the parents the paternal duty of the education of its children, there the legislation is lax, because the family is the moral refuge of the society, a space that must be foreign to the political. We can only trust in the natural sense of the moral duty of the father, in the teachers who moralize the family with the example of the child and in the function of the authorities to advise the families, to induce them to save thanks to the cost of school fees and with that they are capable of “self-control passions”.
