Educational Policy on Rural Schools and Its Impact on Language Teaching: The Second Republic and the Beginning of Democracy

This article analyses the impact of educational policies in rural areas from the Second Republic to the beginning of democracy, focusing on teacher training and its influence on language teaching. During the Second Republic, teacher training prioritised language teaching and solid pedagogical training with supervised internships, which favoured literacy, especially in rural areas. However, under the first Franco regime (1939–1959), the teaching profession was restructured under National Catholicism, prioritising ideology and patriotism over pedagogical preparation. This undermined language teaching and consolidated gender inequalities in teacher training. In the second stage, from the 1960s until Spanish democracy, the 1967 Curriculum promoted a real modernisation of the teaching profession, incorporating subjects such as ‘Didactics of language and literature’ and ‘English language and its didactics’. It was hoped that this would boost language learning, especially in rural areas, where teachers had to adapt their teaching to a student body with scarce resources. However, educational regulation continued to focus on the urban environment, which was detrimental to rural schools, encouraging their abandonment and the concentration of pupils in remote centres. The rural exodus deepened this crisis, further weakening education in these communities. It was not until the compensatory policies of the 1980s that funding for rural schools was resumed, recognising previous mistakes. Although these measures were an improvement, the accumulated inequalities continued to represent a challenge for educational equity in these areas.