Dr. Álvaro Marchesi. Emeritus Professor. Complutense University of Madrid.
The year 2025 is the 50th anniversary of Franco's death. On the occasion the Revista de Educación has considered it important to analyse the transformations that have taken place in education during these five decades.
It is a time that began with the approval of the General Education Law in 1970, which was enacted during the dictatorship and continued during democracy with the approval of the Constitution and with different laws promoted by governments of different political persuasions.
What has become clear once again during these years is that the challenges facing education are highly dependent on social and cultural transformations and that the responses provided are influenced by the dominant social values and the political ideologies of those in power. Moreover, the weight of the European Union, the influence of neighbouring countries and the ascendancy of international education agencies cannot be overlooked in these changes.
These factors are relevant in a highly complex education system configured around a wide range of objectives, training models, teacher selection and support, school networks, teaching, learning and assessment processes, school organisation, management and supervision, educational materials and funding, to name but a few of the most salient. This affects the lives of families and pupils as well as teachers as they are asked to adapt their work to the demands and requirements that are emerging.
The monographic issue aims to reflect, stimulate debate and generate new responses to the following challenges:
Contributions to this issue will allow a better understanding of the education system in some of its dimensions and of the most influential factors, as well as highlighting the strategies that best contribute to improving its functioning and the positive assessment of society.
Deadline: April 21st, 2025
Information for authors: https://www.educacionyfp.gob.es/revista-de- educacion/normas-presentacion/articulos.html
In 2023, the Report done by the Spanish State School Council included the need for "debating the extension of mandatory training and education up to the age of 18" to improve education.
For decades, there has been an expansion "above and below" of compulsory schooling, even up to 19. Some surrounding countries implemented these actions but often in isolation from other collateral actions.
The reasons given are both pragmatic, in the sense of reducing the impact of school dropouts, and strictly pedagogical, related to the need to fully address comprehensive schooling over an extended age range to fulfil the right to education.
This debate challenges the vast education panorama: Long-life learning, post-compulsory education, access to higher education, job insertion, vocational training, the very function of the state school apparatus, and even the very meaning of education and the role of teachers.
This Special Issue aims to collect qualitative and quantitative research works, comparative studies, theoretical essays, and systematic reviews of studies addressing compulsory education. We welcome articles for historical, comparative, or legislative perspectives and even conceptual discussions about bordering terms and constructs, including topics such as public school and the role of the State, alternative or complementary schools, the role of freedom and the right to education, homeschooling, unschooling, etc.
In summary, the Special Issue aims to answer and generate new questions based on the following inquiries:
History has been a central component of school curricula. Historically, its main mission was to provide the epic tale of a community struggling for its existence since the dawn of time. It thus responded to the nationalising aim of the nineteenth century national education systems and their desire to create Frenchmen, Italians or Spaniards. To the geographical imaginary delimited by strictly political borders was added, for each child, a collective becoming that gave meaning to the current political community, one culturally unified in the subjects of language and literature. A territory, a language and a past were the pillars on which the nation was built at school.
The way of doing history that underlay this approach was strongly challenged from the mid-twentieth century onwards and was eventually displaced from the disciplinary field by social history. But before this shift had time to be transferred to the field of education, the postmodern challenge shook the foundations of the discipline itself. New voices from new collectives today make up a contesting polyphony of narratives about the past which, far removed from the unidirectional order of the national epic, is emerging as an evanescent mass of confusing profiles in continuous transformation.
This liquid past raises the question of the meaning of the teaching of history in our schools. Does history still play a role in the shaping of our societies and the way they work? Are we going to replace the old contested national narrative with an axiological archaeology that guarantees the moral pedigree of those people or groups we consider worthy of being included in the Olympus of memory? Does it still make any sense to transmit a vision of the past based on grey social processes that have led to the present? Would it not be more democratic and plural to provide the new generations with rhetorical resources to challenge and participate on equal terms in the battle for the narration of a felt past that makes sense according to their political agenda at any given moment?
This special issue aims to supply a range of positions on all these questions that go beyond purely didactic issues.