Gentile in Spain: An historiographical mirage

Abstract

This article studies the influence of Italian educationalist and philosopher Giovani Gentile in Spain. In the first part, the main features of the Gentile’s thought are analysed as well as the key reform that he implemented in Italy as Mussolini’s first Minister of Education. In the second part, the limited influence of his thought in Spain is studied, both in the main pre-war pedagogical tendencies and in the educational policy and thought after the civil war. It is defended that the seeming coincidence of the Spanish secondary school reform of 1938 and the Gentile Reform is purely superficial, since Spanish Catholicism had a program for reform (primarily aimed at securing the interests of Church schools) whose goals were completely independent from Gentile’s. Then, the supposed influence of the Gentile Reform on the Spanish reform of 1938 is no more than a historiographical mirage.