Heritage and education. Safeguarding and dissemination of the memory of the school from Education Museums in Spain

ABSTRACT

Taking into account the historiographical, memorialist and museological trends at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, there is a growing interest in the cultural heritage of schools. This has meant that, over the last twenty years, school heritage has become a fundamental instrument for the continuous re-signification and revaluation of cultures and identities. Based on qualitative research and the use of the historical-educational method, this article analyses the processes of safeguarding and disseminating historical-educational heritage in Spain. To this end, a content analysis has been carried out of the different Education Museums, specifically their organisation, their ways of conserving school objects and their dissemination practices, focusing this analysis in particular on the Complutense Museum of Education. As the most outstanding results, we can affirm that the great interest in the material and immaterial objects of the school as objects of memory has promoted the creation of a museum culture throughout the country and the creation of numerous Museums of Education as centres of educational memory. These education museums aim to recreate the school memory of their territory or region, which gives them an identity of their own. However, we observe a transgenerational component in that they reflect a coincidence in the reconstruction of the school through the same tangible and intangible heritage sources. Likewise, we can see how in all of them the use and dissemination of objects-footprints reveal some of the silences of the intrahistory of education, conditioned more by teaching practices than by the educational policies enacted in certain periods of our history.

Keywords:
Historical-educational heritage; school memory; education museums; tangible and intangible school objects; Spain