The Educational Missions under the Second Republic in Spain (1931–1936): a framework for popular education

The Educational Missions in the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936) had the purpose of making available, “especially to those living in rural areas, the feeling of progress and the means to participate in it, as well as in its moral stimuli and in the examples of universal progress, so that all the peoples of Spain, even those in remote areas could participate in the benefits and noble joys reserved at that time only for urban centres”. It was an idea that came to insist on the Free School (ILE, Institucion Libre de Ensenanza), founded in 1876 by Francisco Giner, who believed that it was necessary to send the best teachers to the most remote Spanish villages so that their people, who lived in a sort of mental universe alien to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, became involved in the modern views that had already been disseminated in the cities. Between 1931 and 1936, a group of about 700 young intellectuals, artists, writers, teachers, school inspectors and university students went about th...