Schooling and the rural environment: progress or imposition, modernization or acculturation, social mobility or uprooting?

Abstract

The recent publication of Carmen María Cerdá Mondejar’s book (2025) on the implementation in the region of Murcia of the educational reform of the Second Spanish Republic, especially in relation to rural schools, serves as a pretext —after briefly setting out its structure and content— to address two key issues, of a general nature, that underlie and are present throughout the work:
a. Whether it is possible, and to what extent, to speak of a republican educational reform in the years analysed (1931-1636), either because there are, in fact, different conceptions of the reform at stake in those years, or because it is a reform frustrated by the coup d’état of July 1936.
b. If, from a broader temporal and spatial perspective, the school institution and schooling, a product and a social practice of the urban environment in its genesis and configuration, are not, by their very nature, an institution and a practice alien to the educational needs, ways and rhythms of life of the rural world. If, in short, school and schooling have not had, and have, as their object more uprooting than insertion in that world.