Anarchist Education and the Modern School

Francisco Ferrer, Mark Bray

Description

On October 13, 1909, Francisco Ferrer, the notorious Catalan anarchist educator and founder of the Modern School, was executed by firing squad. The Spanish government accused him of masterminding the Tragic Week rebellion, while the transnational movement that emerged in his defense argued that he was simply the founder of the groundbreaking Modern School of Barcelona. Was Ferrer a ferocious revolutionary, an ardently nonviolent pedagogue, or something else entirely?

Anarchist Education and the Modern School is the first historical reader to gather together Ferrer’s writings on rationalist education, revolutionary violence, and the general strike (most translated into English for the first time) and put them into conversation with the letters, speeches, and articles of his comrades, collaborators, and critics to show that the truth about the founder of the Modern School was far more complex than most of his friends or enemies realized. Francisco Ferrer navigated a tempestuous world of anarchist assassins, radical republican conspirators, anticlerical rioters, and freethinking educators to establish the legendary Escuela Moderna and the Modern School movement that his martyrdom propelled around the globe.

Sujets

• Left-libertarianism
• Anti-authoritarianism
• Pedagogy
• Rational
• Socialism
• Education reform
• Libération

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629635330
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader
Edited by Mark Bray and Robert H. Haworth. Translated by Mark Bray and Joseph McCabe
PM Press 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-509-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964735
Cover by John Yates/Stealworks
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
Neither the State, nor the Church, nor the enemies of the Modern School are capable of resisting the immense weight of Justice.
-Francisco Ferrer Guardia
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A NOTE ON TRANSLATION
I Introduction: The Three Faces of Ferrer by Mark Bray
II Francisco Ferrer: The Man by Mark Bray
III The Modern School: Posthumous Explanation and Scope of Rationalist Education
1. Preliminary Explanation
2. La Se orita Meuni
3. Responsibility Accepted
4. The Early Program
5. The Coeducation of the Sexes
6. The Coeducation of the Social Classes
7. School Hygiene
8. The Teachers
9. The Reform of the School
10. Neither Reward nor Punishment
11. Laicism and the Library
12. Sunday Lectures
13. Positive Results
14. In Legitimate Defense
15. The Ingenuousness of the Child
16. Bolet n de la Escuela Moderna
17. The Closing of the Modern School
IV The Modern School Bulletin
1. Modern School Daily Schedule
2. Students Personal Grades
3. Discord in the Family by Alicia Maur
4. Student Presentations
5. Money
6. Direct Action by Dr. Meslier
7. The Renewed School of Tomorrow, the Rebellious School of Today by Grandjouan
V Anarchist Critiques of Ferrer and the Modern School
1. Excerpt of Letter from Jacquinet to Ferrer, November 11, 1900
2. Sociology in the School
3. The Problem of Teaching
VI Ferrer and the Republic
1. Manifesto of the Three Hundred
2. How the Spanish Republic Will End Anarchy
VII Ferrer and the General Strike
1. God or the State: NO-The General Strike: YES
2. The General Strike Will Enrich the Poor without Impoverishing the Rich
3. Will There Be Blood?-Yes, a Lot
4. The Republicans Are Not Revolutionaries-Only the General Strike Will Make the Revolution
5. Preparing the Revolutionary General Strike
6. Property and the Anarchists: The Crazy and the Reasonable
VIII Ferrer s Prison Poems
IX The International League for the Rational Education of Children
X Francisco Ferrer: The Martyr by Mark Bray
The Ferrer Protest Movement of 1909
Immortalizing Ferrer
The Birth of the International Modern School Movement
On the Death of Ferrer
Rudolf Rocker on Ferrer
Ferrer as His Friends Saw Him by Renato Rugieres
The Significance of Ferrer s Death by Emma Goldman
Francisco Ferrer by Voltairine de Cleyre
Tributes from Prominent Figures
The Need of Translating Ideals into Life by Alexander Berkman
Poems for Ferrer
XI Afterword: Learning from Ferrer by Robert H. Haworth
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
INDEX
Acknowledgements
Mark Bray I would like to thank my coeditor Robert H. Haworth and everyone at PM Press. Thank you also to Jelle Bruinsma, Xavi L pez, Dennis Bos, Jorell Mel ndez-Badillo, Miguel P rez, Kevan Antonio Aguilar, Kenyon Zimmer, Pierre Kohler, John-Erik Hansson, Sergio Higuera Barco, David R.A., Adriano Skoda, Frederick Schulze, Temma Kaplan, Ellison Moorehead, Manel Aisa and the Ateneu Enciclop dic Popular , Heather Smedberg and the UCSD Special Collections, and the Fundaci Francesc Ferrer i Guardia. Thank you to my amazing family-I was lucky to be raised by two fantastic teachers! Mr. Xavi, welcome to the world and to my acknowledgements! And to Senia, the love of my life, without you this book, and everything else, would be unimaginable. ( It was a moment like this, do you remember? )
Robert H. Haworth I would like to say a huge thank you to Mark Bray for expanding this project beyond what was originally conceived. I also would like to thank PM Press (Ramsey, Craig, Steven, Stephanie, and everyone else) for their continued efforts to publish important historical and contemporary radical literature. Additionally, I want to thank my children Dylan and Rachel for always challenging my beliefs about the purpose of education. Of course, I can t express how much I appreciate Holly for her insights, support, and love throughout life.
I would also like to dedicate this book to all the teachers who are struggling to create educational spaces that challenge the world we live in, as well as thinking and acting in ways that provide children and youth inspiration for the future.
A Note on Translation
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are entirely my own except The Modern School , which is an expanded and improved version of Joseph McCabe s 1913 abbreviated translation, entitled The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School . McCabe s 1913 translation included only about two-thirds of Ferrer s text, and he sometimes toned down Ferrer s language in an effort to appeal to middle-class English-language readers of the era. Therefore, I supplemented McCabe s work with my own translation of the remaining third of the book, modernized some of his language, and returned certain phrases to the original spirit of Ferrer s revolutionary pedagogical vision.
-Mark Bray
I
Introduction: The Three Faces of Ferrer
Mark Bray
On the morning of October 13, 1909, the famed Catalan pedagogue Francisco Ferrer found himself in front of a firing squad in the moat of Montjuich Castle overlooking Barcelona. After a military show trial plagued by judicial irregularities, the founder of the Modern School was sentenced to death as the author and leader of the rebellion later known as the Tragic Week that erupted over the summer against conscription for the latest Spanish war in Morocco. 1 For days, Ferrer longed for word of a pardon from the Conservative prime minister Antonio Maura, who had issued 119 pardons over the previous two years (54 of them for murder), but he would not be so fortunate. 2 Instead he spent his final day in the prison chapel where he resolutely refused religious council from the military chaplain, even making a failed plea to authorities to remove the crucifix and altar lamp from the last room he would ever inhabit. When asked if he believed in an afterlife, Ferrer replied, No, se or. I believe that everything ends here; that everything terminates with the life of a man. Since I acquired this conviction many years ago I have adapted all of my actions to it. 3 And so, having spent his final years adapting his pedagogical actions to the certainty that nothing mattered beyond life on earth, he stared down the barrels of the rifles pointed in his direction. Muchachos, Ferrer cried out, aim well and fire without fear! I am innocent! Viva la Escuela Moderna ! Amid his final words shots rang out. Ferrer faltered briefly before collapsing to the ground. 4
While it may have ended right there for Francisco Ferrer the man, Francisco Ferrer the martyr was actively inspiring a groundbreaking international mobilization against this clerical judicial murder. 5 A historic wave of protest that had had been mounting since Ferrer s arrest cascaded down upon international public opinion as marches, demonstrations, meetings, and even riots across Europe, North Africa, and the Americas defended the legacy of Ferrer and his coeducational, antiauthoritarian, student-centered Modern School. This wave of protest sparked the creation of (more or less) Ferrerian schools across the world, from Mexico to Poland, from China and Japan to Czechoslovakia and the United States, in what came to be known as the Modern School movement. Despite the surging popularity of Ferrer s rationalist educational ideals, however, critics argued that Ferrer was a philandering, bloodthirsty anarchist who abandoned his children and defrauded a hapless widow to gamble on the stock market, finance shadowy assassins, and construct a sacrilegious school that taught children how to construct bombs.

1907 postcard of Ferrer. IISG BG A61/180.
In order to refute these accusations and appeal to moderate allies, Ferrer s principal supporters often denied or downplayed his anarchism and constructed an image of him as a freethinking pedagogical innovator who was martyred solely for his audacious attempt to promote rationalist education in clerical Spain. As the prominent Dreyfusard and novelist Anatole France asked, What is his crime? His crime is being a republican, socialist, freethinker. His crime is having promoted lay education in Barcelona, instructing thousands of children in independent morality. His crime is having founded a school and a library. 6 According to this depiction, the Modern School operated based on purely scientific and rational principles free from all preconceived ideology. The Spanish government s opposition to such groundbreaking pedagogy showed that Ferrer was but the latest victim of the Inquisition. Yet his death was all the more shocking for having occurred in the twentieth century when such barbarity was widely thought to be a relic of the past. Many saw Ferrer as the Spanish Dreyfus, an echo of the case of the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus who was wrongfully accused of treason a decade earlier in France. One pamphlet even claimed that Ferrer had ta