En el año del burro: Platero, Freinet y un silencio desenterrado.

Abstract

Retrieving the historical memory of the Spanish school education over the last century is a difficult and risky task where sometimes a dramatic surprise appears. For example, from the excavation of a mass grave of the Civil War in the Alto de la Pedraja, the biography of a simple rural teacher could be found. He was born in Catalonia and in the thirties of the last century, he made his students from a school in the village of Bureba Banuelos (Burgos) read Platero and I (being now the centenary of its first edition) and work with Freinet printing techniques, printing their own notebooks with their experiences (The portraitist) and desires (The Sea) Finding that grave we know he was brutally murdered in the early days of the war, his remains buried anonymously and sentenced to oblivion for seven decades.

Antonio Benaiges, the teacher who promised the sea (digging up the silence) is the title of the book that tells the whole recovery process of this "memory of life and death", which is as shocking as humanly annd pedagogically instructive.