Tiempo y memoria del Instituto-Escuela

Abstract

The commemoration of the centenary of the Instituto-Escuela in 2018 is an opportunity to vindicate a transcendental institution in Spanish education and, however, quite unknown, outside certain academic areas. Perhaps it is the least known of the institutions that led the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (JAE) in order to modernize and promote Spanish science, culture and education, in the first third of the 20th century. The Instituto-Escuela was conceived as an experimental center for Secondary Education and teacher training, where a new and ambitious way of educating was tried which gathered the legacy of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) and the most advanced European pedagogy of the time. It opened its doors in 1918 in Madrid and developed its pedagogical project without interruption until 1936, when the Civil War broke out. It was after this when his history and his legacy entered a long period of almost absolute oblivion until fairly recent dates.

One of the seats that the Instituto-Escuela had, the Retiro Section, located next to Madrid's famous park, is since 1939 the Instituto Isabel la Católica. For this reason it has kept, in addition to the building itself, a file with records of students, a library of about 1,500 books with the seal of the center itself and abundant scientific-educational material. Since 2006, a group of teachers have been working on the recovery of the historical-educational heritage of the Instituto-Escuela to make known its existence and meaning in the history of Spanish education, discover the validity of many of the pedagogical innovations that introduced, and use it as a didactic resource in interdisciplinary projects that we carry out each course with our students.