From purged teachers to self-censored teachers. For an anti-fascist pedagogy
A few days ago I attended as a member of the public the presentation of Pere Carrió's latest book, El magisteri depurat a les Illes Balears (Lleonard Muntaner, 2026). It was held in the UGT assembly hall, which was overflowing with retired teachers, women and men with many years of books, blackboards, and childhoods grown up on their shoulders who, like Pere, have endured and largely explain the educational system in the Balearic Islands.
The purge process that Carrió details in his exhaustive research was one of the repression mechanisms of the regime that sought, as professor Joan Maria Thomàs rightly explained, to erase the concept of the Republic's school, that is to say: a model of school understood as a space for the formation of citizens. In the case of the Islands, the purge process was even more intense than in the rest of the State, comparable only to that of cities like Barcelona and Oviedo. In fact, even before the purge process, many teachers were also murdered and repressed by the coup plotters.
The mere fact of being affiliated with a union, such as the Federation of Education Workers, or the suspicion of 'sympathizing' with any progressive idea, was enough reason to be permanently removed from work. Many even had their family assets confiscated. For others, the suspension was temporary. And for all those who continued to teach, the submission to the dictates of what Franco considered the social functions of education generated great frustration. We are talking about teachers, many of whom had been training since the 19th century under new methodologies, who understood education as a tool for liberation, not domination. Let us remember that Guillem Cifre de Colonya had already been one of the founders of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza decades earlier, advocating for non-segregated, secular, meaningful education accessible to the working classes.
As Bernat Sureda rightly pointed out, in reality, Francoism and the purge process did not only aim to put an end to the ideal of the II Republic's school, but to the entire accumulated liberal tradition that assumed education as a fundamental tool for the transformation and modernization of society. The school was once again left in the hands of the national-Catholic church, the Falange, and the committees that directed the purges of teachers.
And yet, many purged teachers did not renounce their ideals nor their way of being that clashed with the Francoist school, but which they could recreate discreetly within the classrooms. Many retired teachers who were present at the presentation of Carrió's book in the hall had been students of some of those teachers condemned to silence, but who continued to advocate from the sidelines for democratic education in the midst of a dictatorship.
This reflection brings me to the present day, when we throw up our hands at the statistics on the large number of young men who wouldn't mind living under a dictatorship. Or when the Spanish national team plays against Egypt and all that's heard are racist and Islamophobic shouts. Or when a teacher is assaulted at a high school in Mallorca for homophobic reasons, just a few days ago.
I want to stop here because I do not share the corporate and, in a way, reductionist reactions I have observed: it is not just a problem of homophobia. Nor is it just a loss of authority or respect for teachers. The issue is much deeper, and teachers also bear some responsibility, who, of course, must condemn the assaults (also when students suffer them and we do not resolve or condemn them with the same intensity), but the response cannot be the revictimization of teachers. There are also homophobic, misogynistic, racist, and authoritarian teachers, in case you hadn't noticed.
I believe we need much more proactivity, as Professor Enrique Díez suggests in his book Pedagogia Antifeixista (Octaedro, 2025). Let's start by assuming that fascism is not just a political movement, but an educational phenomenon and that, therefore, it challenges us and challenges our work and functions as teachers. The response cannot be, as I hear in conversations with many colleagues, self-censorship, as if any topic could not be discussed in the classroom. Not addressing these issues openly – and pedagogically thought out – only increases the cancer that authoritarianism represents.
There is no neutral education, and for those colleagues and teachers who have not yet discovered it, the very idea of inclusive, critical and emancipatory education is contrary to the political projects of those who today threaten democracy, and who also socialize children and adolescents through the algorithm. Whoever thinks that from their false trench of neutrality they will not suffer the purges that are to come is mistaken. That is why memory is as important as the commitment to an anti-fascist pedagogy as a condition for a pedagogy of hope.
