Informal Education and the Political Conscience of the Popular Classes: The Politization of the Spanish Almanacs of the 19th Century

• Autores: Miryam Carreño
• Localización: Paedagogica Historica: International journal of the history of education, ISSN 0030-9230, Vol. 38, Nº. 1, 2002 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Books and education: 500 years of reading and learning), págs. 187-207
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • Extra-institutional educational agents, namely, those operating outside the official educational system, have been more present in earlier human society than today; especially those concerning the education of the popular classes, which is the subject of this article, those popular classes having having faced great difficulties, throughout History, to access educational institutions. There have been differentforms of informal education, which have been imparted by many different agents. However, in this article we analyse only one of those agents, which were very popular among the commoners of the 19th century: almanacs, also known as calendars.

    These little books, being very popular amongst the commoners, became an effective means of communication of information and propaganda, an important instrument for the transmission of moral values and norms of behaviour. Thus, the instructive purposes of almanacs are inferred from the contents themselves. Although that instruction is rather elementary, it is an important means of organisation in everyday life, for they informed about local religious festivities, agricultural matters, etc. Sometimes, these almanacs could even illustrate medicine, hygiene, morals, etc.

    Notwithstanding their importance and influence in everyday life, the aim of this article is the study of the contribution of almanacs to people's politization. Here, we define politics as all those general questions linked to nation-wide matters - outside the sphere of local matters - related to government or state, such as sovereignty, nation, war, succession, monarchy, republic, etc., and politization as having a real interest in learning about these questions.

    So that, through the analysis of these sources, we can affirm that almanacs have been a main instrument of politization, that purpose being clear in several of them. Their political nature has different forms, from simple reminders of important dates, to elaborated, though concise and clear, expositions explaining concepts such as national sovereignty, civil rights, republic and others.