ABSTRACT
The 1970 Ley General de Educación (LGE) is generally regarded as marking an important watershed in the history of Spanish education, similar in significance to if less effective than, say, the 1944 Education Act in England and Wales. Its major provisions are outlined in the previous chapter. Saying that it signified the beginning of a ‘modern’ conception of education even in the final years of the Franco regime is perhaps to run the risk of undervaluing earlier periods of educational innovation, as during the preFranco Second Republic. The 1970 Act is sometimes regarded as a good illustration of the ‘technocratic’ period of late Francoism, an attempt to adapt social institutions to the demands of a more advanced and competitive industrial economy within an authoritarian framework of government. On the other hand, there was much in the legislation that still seems educationally sound in the 1990s. While certain of its measures were flawed-the continuing division between academic and vocational education, the conception of a ‘pre-university’ year of secondary education-by far the most debilitating feature of the reform was the failure of the Cortes to vote through necessary finance for its full implementation. The memory of that failure continues to inform much of the educational critique of the 1990 successor to LGE, namely LOGSE. This article was originally written in the context of a doctoral dissertation (O’Malley, 1990) which examined the political antecedents of the 1970 Act.
