Struggle for freedom in the works of Francisco Ferrer Francesc Ferrer I Guàrdia

Main article: Escuela Moderna
With this inheritance, Ferrer returned to Spain in 1901, where he would found the Barcelona Modern School, Escuela Moderna. Spain was in a time of self-reflection after losing the Spanish–American War, particularly regarding their national education.^[13] Liberals and radicals wanted more secular curriculum, with new scientific, historical, and sociological content and teachers not beholden to diocesan inspectors.^[14] Ferrer, a fervent atheist,^[15] became prominent in these conversations and advocated for a rational school as an alternative to the religious dogma and compulsory lessons common within Spanish schools.^[16] As a speaker, he was unpretentious and uncharismatic, but his sincerity and capacity for organization inspired others.^[17] Ferrer followed in a rough and ready Spanish tradition of extragovernment, rationalist education: the republicans and Fourierists schools (1840–50s), the anarchist and secularist schools (1870–80s), Paul Robin's Cempuis orphanage, Elías Puig (Catalonia), and José Sanchez Rosa (Andalusia).^[16]
Ferrer's libertarian pedagogy also borrowed from 18th century rationalism, 19th century romanticism, and pedagogues including Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy. This tradition pursued freewheeling liberties for children at the expense of conformity, regulation, and discipline. It combined play and crafts alongside academic work and championed traits of reason, dignity, self-reliance, and scientific observation over that of piety and obedience. It advocated for learning through experience rather than drilled instruction by rote, and for treating children with love and warmth. This model's adherents, in seeking a school that eschewed religious and political authority, thought that changes in mass education would circumvent the stunted public enlightenment and preservation of status quo that they blamed on the influence of both church and state.^[18] Free education, to Ferrer, entailed educators who would use improvised experimentation to arouse the child's will and autodidactic drive rather than impose their own dogmatic ideas through formal curriculum.^[19]
The Escuela Moderna opened on Barcelona's Carrer de les Corts with thirty students in September 1901. More than 126 students were enrolled five years later, in 1906, when the state shuttered the school. The Escuela Moderna charged sliding scale tuition based on parental capacity to pay, and divided students into three curricular levels.^[20] Ferrer's pedagogy sought to strip dogma from education and instead help children direct their own powers. Ferrer's school eschewed punishments and rewards, which he felt incentivized deception over sincerity. Similarly, he did not adopt grades or exams, whose propensity to flatter, deflate, and torture Ferrer considered injurious. Ferrer prioritized practical knowledge over theory, and encouraged children to experience rather than read. Lessons entailed visits to local factories, museums, and parks where the objects of the lesson could be experienced firsthand. Pupils planned their own work and were trusted and free to attend as they pleased.^[21]
The Escuela Moderna additionally hosted a school to train teachers and a radical publishing press, which translated and created more than 40 textbooks adequate for Ferrer's purposes, written in accessible language on recent scientific concepts. The Spanish authorities abhorred the books, which covered topics from math and grammar to natural and social sciences to religious mythology and the iniquities of patriotism and conquest, for upending social order.^[22] The press's monthly journal hosted the school's news and articles from prominent libertarian writers.^[23]
Aside from the school's purpose of fostering self-development, Ferrer believed it had an additional function: prefigurative social regeneration. The school was an embryonic version of the future libertarian society Ferrer hoped to see. Propaganda and agitation were central to the Escuela Moderna's aims, as Ferrer dreamt of a society in which people constantly renewed themselves and their environment through experimentation.^[23] To this end, students received dogmatic instruction in the form of moral indoctrination. Ferrer believed that respect for fellow men was a quality to be instilled in children, as children brought to love freedom and see their dignity as shared with others would become good adults. The lessons of this education in social justice, equality, and liberty included capitalism as evil, government as slavery, war as crime against humanity, freedom as fundamental to human development, and suffering produced through patriotism, exploitation, and superstition. Their textbooks took positions against capitalism, the state, and the military.^[24] This education extended to adults, as well. The school invited parents to participate in the school's operation and the public to attend evening and Sunday afternoon lessons.^[21] Ferrer also advocated for a Spanish popular university that never came to fruition.^[25]
Ferrer was the center of Barcelonian libertarian education for the decade between his return and his death. The Escuela Moderna's program, from Ferrer's anticlericalism to the quality of guest intellectual lecturers, had impressed even middle-class liberal reformers. Anarchist Emma Goldman credited the success of the school's expansion to Ferrer's methodical administrative ability.^[26]
Other schools and centers in his model spread across Spain and to South America.^[5] By the time Ferrer opened a satellite school in the nearby textile center Vilanova i la Geltrú towards the end of 1905, Ferrer schools in the image of his Escuela Moderna, for both children and adults, grew across eastern Spain: 14 in Barcelona and 34 across Catalonia, Valencia, and Andalusia. The Spanish Republicans and the secular League of Freethinkers organized their own classes using materials from the school press, with around 120 such rationalist schools in all.^[27]