Ethnohistory and Educational Policy. Rethinking the subject and the sources in the republican educational reform in Spain (1931-1936)

Abstract

The history of educational policy, like other specialized ones, has experienced different historiographical changes in response to the ways in which historians have been perceiving the epistemological crisis of the social sciences. In this changing context, our first objective is to show the innovative potential and the heuristic fruitfulness that rehabilitation of everyday life offers, the return to a philosophy of the subject and the use of ethnographic sources to explain the structure and functionality of power by identifying the similarities and divergences between the logic of the speeches and the sense of practices in the history of educational policy. These epistemological attitudes are applied to the study of the republican educational reform in Spain. Our second objective is to reveal that the controversial and disputed issues of the educational policy of this period are susceptible of being depicted in a better way from diverse perspective provided by the memories and omissions of its actors, the orality, and in general, the ethnographic research.