The General Law of Education of 1970 in Spain. The discussion of the project in Parliament and the limits of developmental "reformism"

Abstract

The draft General Education and Financing Law of the Educational Reform of 1970 in Spain was proposed as a comprehensive reform of training, based on equal opportunities, and free and compulsory education. However, the debates in the Parliament of the draft of Law and the provisions finally established with the promulgation of the General Education Law show in an exemplary way what the developmentalist “authoritarian reformism”; was most widely. Within a mechanism of “social reproduction” through educational strategies, developmental reformism in education was limited by the contradiction of advancing in a technocratic modernization under traditional and conservative principles and privileges. A historical-educational research is carried out, through documentary and historical analysis of parliamentary and newspaper debates, together secondary sources. From these ideological premises, this paper analyzes how in the debates of the Parliament, around the project of the General Education Law of 1970, the need of democratic opening, of the end of the sixties of the twentieth century, collided with the desire to maintain the ideological and political bases of the Franco´s regime.