Liberalismo, institucionalización educativa y construcción nacional. Encuentros y desencuentros entre identidadesel caso gallego

Abstract

The process of institutionalization of a national system of education in Spain begins with the Ancien Règime crisis and is connected with the genesis and development of a new model of liberal society. In the first half of the nineteenth century it will be promoted an important number of reforms that, since the Quintana's Report (1813) to the Moyano Act (1857), will cause the extension and improvement of the elementary instruction, the spreading of useful knowledge and the modernization of the scientific structure for creating a new citizen, member of a new State. Education and language will be the cohesive elements of the project, based on a standardized nationalism of Spanish character. Nevertheless, the linguistic standardization imposed by the Spanish liberal bourgeoisie will cause awareness in several parts of the country, like Galicia, Catalonia or the Basque Country. And so, Catalanism, Basquism or Galicianism become demanding feelings of a different ethnocultural identity, against the centralized offensive that neutralized the other singularities. In the Galician case, our interest is focused on the proposals made by the protonationalist movement of the middle of the nineteenth century, which intended to combine the social progress of the liberal model and the need for preserving the cultural identity of Galicia. This movement would demand an open recognition of the Galician differential factor, developing from it a proper educational reality. To this respect, the linguistic element would have an essential valence, as well as a whole past to (re)knowing and learning. We intend, following the aforesaid, to detect the tenseness between the Spanish national process of construction and its Galician counterpart in the liberal framework - of course, considering the scale occupied by the one and the other -, their proposals in those sense, and the dialogue, or the lack of it, between them.