Franco in the classroom. Book. Mª Jesús Martin-Diaz

In reality, it would be about the Second Republic and Francoism in the school classrooms.

A teacher, María Jesús Martín-Díaz, discovered 22 school notebooks belonging to her mother, spanning from 1931, the year the Second Republic began, to 1949, the early years of Franco's dictatorship. She studied them and has decided to share them in this book.

Childhood, which under the Republic had begun to be viewed as a stage of free, creative, and rational development, came to be shaped by the rigid principles of ultra-conservative Catholicism and authoritarian nationalism.

It wasn't necessary for bombs to fall on the school for the effects of war to be felt: the regime also imposed its control through chalk and slogans. It was as if Francoism were sitting at every desk, watching and suppressing.

These seemingly humble and routine homework notebooks, fragile like a child's handwriting, reveal both the innovative pedagogical approach of the Republic and the subsequent, devastating backlash against education that students experienced in the classrooms during the Spanish Civil War and the immediate postwar period.

On the walls where colorful maps of the world had once hung, crucifixes now hung. The phrases, the themes, and even the silences reveal the imposition of a new order in the classroom: the introduction of fear, obedience, and submission to authority. The schoolwork reflects this ideological takeover.

Author: María Jesús Martín-Díaz

Born in Madrid in 1955, daughter of parents from Ávila.

She has worked as a teacher, specializing in Physics and Chemistry in secondary education.