Controversy in the Classroom: An Analysis of Spanish Secondary School Education on the Spanish Civil War, Franco Dictatorship, and Transition to Democracy

Spain’s transition to democracy has long been considered a prime example of the successful stabilization and consolidation of democracy. This success was long attributed to a decision at the time of the transition to leave the past behind, to forego any efforts towards truth, reconciliation, or justice regarding the crimes and human rights violations committed during the country’s civil war (1936-1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). Instead, an Amnesty Law, colloquially referred to as the Pact of Forgetting, was passed by the new Spanish parliament. However, this pact to ignore the past has hardly existed in perpetuity. In the last 20 years, Spain’s violent and controversial past has re-emerged as a topic of political debate, most recently in the form of a proposal for a new Democratic Memory Law currently under debate in Spain’s parliament.

In this thesis, I investigate Spain’s relationship to its controversial past through the lens of a key vehicle for establishing collective memory: education. Specifically, I seek to understand how and to what extent Spanish secondary school students in Madrid, Barcelona, and Sevilla learn about the Spanish Civil War, Franco dictatorship, and the country’s transition to democracy. An online survey on the coverage of these periods in the classroom was sent to secondary school history teachers across the three aforementioned cities in Spain, at both public and private institutions. The survey was available between January and March of 2022 and received 132 responses.

Ultimately, a higher percentage of respondents than I had anticipated cover the periods in question (the Spanish Civil War, Franco dictatorship, transition to democracy) in their classrooms. Across the board, the Spanish Civil War is the period which receives the highest coverage, out of these. Comparatively, there is markedly higher coverage of the civil war and dictatorship in non-Catholic schools than in Catholic schools. All of the periods of history in question are much more likely to be covered in the baccalaureate history course than in the mandatory secondary education history course. Finally, out of the cities in question, Barcelona had the lowest percentage of coverage of these periods of history, as compared to Madrid and Sevilla.

The most notable takeaway of this thesis, I argue, is that a number of Spanish history teachers have incorporated modern historical memory developments such as the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, the exhumations of Spanish Civil War era mass graves, and the exhumation of Franco’s remains, into their classrooms. This incorporation, thanks to the volition of individual teachers or occasionally due to students raising these current events themselves, represents a clear impact of the delayed transitional justice movement in Spain.