ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I analyse how there was a very powerful movement of teachers and teacher educators, during the first third of the twentieth century, very enthusiastic about the reforms that were beginning to take place in the Second Spanish Republic. However, this movement was destroyed by the Franco dictatorship which annihilated several changes in the pedagogical conceptions of Spanish teachers and which have not been recovered. The most common teacher education model in Spain today is to create effective civil servants, not all of whom are encouraged to be interested in developing an active pedagogy. Spanish teachers are reluctant to make commitments beyond the classroom programme entrusted to them and are reticent about structural changes in classrooms and gender and sexual issues. So, a ‘neo-liberal’ pressure exists on the Spanish school, very evident in some parts of the Spanish conservative party (Partido Popular). There is, of course, a minority of teachers who are at the forefront of pedagogy, who want to build a world with other values, but their impact on the educational system and on teacher education is very low. My hypothesis is that teachers and teacher educators are moving further and further away from the emerging inclusive values of young people, and that will be a serious problem, in the political context of the Spanish school system in the future.
