The purpose of this paper is to analyse the culture of health promoted in Spanish primary schools under the ideology of the Franco regime (1936-1975). To this end, we have investigated the school textbooks of the period, fundamental resources in the teaching-learning process, which were used to try to modify the behaviour of the population in relation to health and illness. From an ethnographic approach, we have analysed both the discourse on children’s practices and the ideology of body and health promoted. Although the regime’s own discipline and social control left their mark on the health taught, social and political transformations gradually modulated it towards a less moralising notion of health that was more indebted to expert discourse.
Keywords
Francoism; School textbooks; Health education; Body