Image of Mario Modesto Mata from the wikipedia
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During the dictatorship of Franco, Spain was a land of legal murders and children's torture. The ideological heirs of Franco have still the power and refuse seeing into the criminal responsibility of that time. They even make fun of the people who was killed.
I’m going to write about the teachers of my parents. All that I’m
going to explain is concerned with the teachers of my parents and
generally the teachers of that time.
They used to use fear to convince the children. By terrorizing them,
they got their obedience. During their childhood, those adults had
been scared by authoritarian teachers, and they had grown up learning
that their world was a wild forest of miserable people, and that only
discipline and catholic education could save them from human hell.
When Franco took power they discovered themselves as teachers, and
they applied what they had learnt according to the ideology of the
time. As children they learnt that if they wanted to be fair people,
they should obey and accept their grey and boring fate.
Besides, they were slaves of the image as the whole society was. They
should take care of the image they showed to people, the image that
sorted everybody, and that decided who was honorable and who was a
shameful citizen. Teachers taught their pupils to live according the
dictatorship of image and prestige.
The main tool of the teachers of my parents was violence. They
believed in violence; the violence of the punishments, the violence
of their religious ideas about the hell and the devil, the power of
the blood. «The words are taught through blood» they used to say.
They screened these cruel ideas upon the minds of the children, and
this screening worked not only through what teachers talked to them
but what they didn’t tell them either. Silences were as loud as
shouts were. Screams were the usual poetry of the imperfect children.
Those educators were ill; their minds were as ill as the society
where they had grown up were.
Today we can talk about their deep mistakes: their obsessive
separation between girls and boys, their insane fear of sexuality and
nakedness, their neurotic fight to reach the perfection in the goal
of achieving the order in life and things, in the timetibles, in the
way that they wanted everyone to dress, in the way they wanted
everybody to speak, walk, play, dream, live...
Their pedagogic lines consisted in memorizing more than
understanding. It happened that many times not even the educators
understood the core of what they taught.
Since 1939, and during decades, most teachers were settled by the
government of Franco. They were young adults, eighteen years old
sometimes, and they were sent to thousands of towns and villages down
the poor and devastated Spain after the civil war. By that time,
thousands of old teachers had been killed due to their republican
ideas.so that either the teachers that remained working or the new
and young teachers were all keen on the dictatorship, or they tried
to seem so at least. There were terrible injustices, like the teacher
that was condemned to death for having taught about the reproduction
of donkies, or many other teachers who were killed for having been
talked to the children about freedom and resistence against the
fascism. So teachers who survived were like scared sheep obeying an
evil wolf, or maybe evil sheep worshipping an even more evil wolf.
Since that time, two or three generations of people have been
educated wallowing in the darkness of an evil society, learning to
close their mouths, to obey without claiming, to value their survival
more than the quality of their life, to distrust freedom or anything
related to freedom.
It was a sad time. Nowadays education is much better.
