Criticism about the story: Aldecoa
The Republic praised the task of its teachers, the same ones that Franco would take care of repressing and vituperating. In the nationalist Spain at war, the phalangism was implemented, of remarkable action on educational and specifically in those related to the education of women, children and adolescents. The ideological points of Falangist education were nationalism and Catholicism, instrumentalized by the habits of obedience, discipline, uniformity and centralism. Falangist strategies and foundations (in addition to those of Catholic traditionalism) were incorporated into educational processes in the 1945 Primary Education Law, after dismantling the System of the Second Republic. The texts in the educational books for children and adolescents were adopted to the designated model, the Florido Pensoil being the collective reference text in the memory of many Spanish children in the postwar period.
In the story Aldecoa mocks, the author appeals to the double game that reflects the student/teacher opposition, and after the usual act of rebellion of every puber, the pedagogical response is repression and threat to end in the river. After the war, the purification (imprisonment, separation of the position for life, also executions) of the teachers of the Republic left a vacuum covered now with people related to the regime – priests, nuns or secular – with more ideological training than educating vocation,academic knowledge or talent. The level of formation of those teachers of first letters in the postwar period was, except very great exceptions, that of literacy. The qualification of the first -letter teachers – sometimes adolescents or nuns of rural extraction, whose mission was to teach girls, in addition to alphabet, sewing and domestic work, in summary to form servile third citizens who only work as useful idiotsof the system.
The school was distant, on the road that carried away, with brown and roofing walls a bored roof from where they hung dead nests. Without garden. The crystals were also as stabbed and in raining everything groaned, the wooden banks and the chromos of the Gospel (Matute, 1948: 58).
The children’s world in the work of Ignacio Aldecoa, is a space characterized by closed and the autonomous with respect to external reality. Apart from the family, – a military training field, – as a basic and fundamental social relationship of children – that is a failure in their communication and protection function for the children’s character, and that exerts a negative influence in relation to sufferingInterior in the rest of the Narrative characters Aldeanos -, the school, or the school, supposes, in turn, another inevitable component that marks the few social contacts, as occurs in the Patio de Armas story, where the pedagogical space is the variantWith repetition of a scenario in which drills of military strategies are carried out and simultaneously meets the fascist machinery of the control and surveillance of the bodies by a German officer. The school is negatively referred.
In summary, the figure of the teacher appears humble, unworthy, satirically comic or unpleasant negative to the perverse oppressive, and the school is described as a part of the unacceptable social order for the children’s character. Children, locked in their completely autonomous internal world, maintain a firm antithetical attitude, rebellious and contrary to the order of external social reality that, symbolically, imposes the image of the school, “it will be youth whatever you want. Very little times it is original ". (Chesterton).
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