‘Towards an education in freedom. Schooling in Barcelona 1908-1979’ at El Born CCM
The exhibition offers a journey through the history of education in the 20th century.
Barcelona City Council approved its special budget for culture in 1908 as a plan for the comprehensive reform of education in the city, based on a free, high-quality and secular public education in Catalan, with boys and girls sharing classrooms. Unfortunately, the project failed, but it became an example for movements that have fought to renew education in our country. El Born CCM now talks to us about it.
Curated by Antoni Nicolau, the exhibition ‘Towrds an education in freedom. Schooling in Barcelona 1908-1979’ offers a journey through the history of education in the 20th century and its links with predominant political options from that time. The display starts in Barcelona at the turn of the century and covers the time through until the recovery of democracy.
Poverty, Mancomunitat and Francoism
As visitors enter the exhibition they find themselves in a street in El Raval at the end of the 19th century, recreating the socio-economic reality in the city at that time. The next space offers a radical change of scenery, with a large plenary chamber at the City Hall and a video mapping projection of the debate on the budget for 1908.
The spaces devoted to the Mancomunitat and the Republic lead to the last room, a Francoist space which evokes the fear, tension and oppression which characterised the regime, adopting the form of a cage to simulate the limits on education in the hands of the Falange and the clergy.
Alternative activities
Besides the display, the exhibition includes a monographic publication and a programme of activities promoting meeting points to talk about the present and the future of education. These activities are organised by the centre in collaboration with different bodies such as the Barcelona Municipal Institute for Education (IMEB) and the Fundació Ferrer i Guàrdia.
The initiative seeks to promote the renewing principles of education, contemplated in the budget of 1908 and serving as an example over the course of the 20th century, and to offer a long-term vision on the evolution of education in Barcelona. In addition, the organisers aim to show the current relevance of some of the concerns from a hundred years ago on how to get education programmes to fit in with society as a whole, and to reflect on the quality of education and the social demands of today and tomorrow.
