Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain

During the early twentieth century, neo-humanist reforms transformed the landscape of Spanish education. Building upon the new science of child study, known as paidology, teachers joined pedagogues around the world in reading works by Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and others. Celebrating open-air schools, sensorial education and active methods of learning, intellectuals including Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Carmen Conde sought to contrast a positivist pedagogy with a phenomenological approach to childhood. Education, they claimed, must adapt to the child’s developing body and mind.

Bringing together avant-garde art, poetry, teachers’ manuals, intelligence tests, and children’s creative production, Anna Kathryn Kendrick traces how reformers drew upon inter­national models to advance ‘catholic’ notions of holism and universality. This award-winning study demonstrates that the fight for an education in mind, body, and spirit had not only intellectual but also practical consequences which were to shape an entire generation before the Spanish Civil War.

About the Author:

Anna Kathryn Kendrick is Director of Global Awards and Scholarships and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Literature at NYU Shanghai.