Introduction

Over the past few years, society at large has been undergoing difficult transformations. The advances of science and technology have transformed what it means to be human in today’s world, and the nature of social relations. Education and culture, the meaning and scope of which have been greatly extended, are essential for the development of individuals and of society as a whole. We know that all cultures are part of humanity’s shared heritage. The cultural identity of a people is renewed and enriched by contact with the traditions and values of others. Culture is dialogue, the exchange of ideas and experiences, the appreciation of other values and traditions, and hence, it withers and dies when it is isolated. (DECLARACIÓN DE MÉXICO SOBRE LAS POLÍTICAS CULTURALES, 1982). The rationale for the projects being carried out in Spain is based on the premise that all peoples have the right and obligation to defend and preserve their cultural heritage - especially since the founding, in 2004, of the Sociedad Española para el Estudio del Patrimonio Histórico Educativo (Sephe). It includes the protection, conservation, study, investigation and recovery of our historical educational heritage. It is also concerned with activities that promote, stimulate, support and disseminate these goals. Many people are working hard on co-operating for the advancement of historical educational knowledge, the development of new museum-based focuses, and the promotion of all that can be learned from people’s memories and the heritage of school culture. (^{MEDA; BADANELLI, 2013}).

Important studies on its historical educational heritage have originated in Spain in the past decade. (^{ESCOLANO BENITO; HERNÁNDEZ DÍAZ, 2002}; ESCOLANO BENITO, 2007; ^{JUAN BORROY, 2008}; ^{LÓPEZ MARTÍN, 2013}; ^{MORENO MARTÍNEZ, 2009}; 2015; RUÍZ BERRIO, 2009). The country is now recognised as being amongst those which are taking special interest in the material - and non - material historical reconstruction of the memory of education. The role being played by ethnohistory and the social history of education in the construction of today’s historical-educational processes has led Spain’s education historians - in line with those of several other countries - to pay particularly close attention to interpreting the school culture of the past. They are doing so by analysing the teaching materials used, school furniture, school buildings, school textbooks, accounts of people’s schooldays, etc.

There are a variety of actions involved in Spanish society’s commitment to the history of education, relating to the study and dissemination of people’s memories of education. There have been many research projects; congresses, conferences and seminars have been held on the topic; temporary, roving exhibitions have been set up; various doctoral theses have been defended on the subject, and many undergraduate- and pre-doctoral dissertations have been written (an academic career in Spain includes an intermediary research viva between undergraduate and doctoral work); a number of projects aimed at innovating and improving pedagogical practices have been implemented; a large number of books, journal articles and exhibition catalogues have been published; and so on. This stands in evidence of Spain’s healthy tradition of research into historical educational heritage. (^{MEDA; BADANELLI, 2013}).

Particularly in the past fifteen years, the study of educational heritage has gained standing in the country as an emerging discipline in its own right. It has given rise to an extensive body of theoretical knowledge, along - as we have seen - with numerous projects, programmes, actions and practices originating in various educational environments (universities, in particular). The copious numbers of publications recorded in Spain about educational heritage and memories of education form an epistemological corpus which is increasingly large and along similar lines to significant corpora being compiled elsewhere in the world. In this paper, we enumerate and indeed elucidate many of the plans, processes, tasks and people in Spain contributing to the dissemination and public awareness of historical educational heritage.

Furthermore, in the past four decades, we have seen a huge increase in education museums. In Spain, in the rest of Europe and in America (RUÍZ BERRIO, 2006), these institutions have made conscientious efforts to encourage the construction of a historical educational perspective in our time, through the conservation and promotion of what has been handed down to us from the schooling systems of the past. Gone, fortunately, are the 19th-Century museums which built collections for collection’s sake, catering almost exclusively for an erudite, privileged audience; gone, too, are the exhibitions of sacred objects, viewed as guidance for the culture and conduct of a society; and the centralising museum structures and traditional single-discipline methods have fallen by the wayside. Today, various political bodies, and universities in particular, are implementing significant initiatives in museology with the aim of preserving our educational heritage, exhibiting it in a dignified fashion and disseminating knowledge of it. At the time of writing, in the case of Spain, we could count around sixty pedagogical museology initiatives, of varying type, character, size and impact. (^{ÁLVAREZ DOMÍNGUEZ, 2016a}; 2016b)². This is without including the well-known collections of school materials passed on through private initiatives. The tradition of historical educational heritage in our society today points towards a healthy future.

Museology of Education and the current education museums in Spain are committed in their drive to salvage and display a significant sample of the country’s educational heritage. These artefacts are effective tools for helping to ensure the fundamental human right of access to culture and respect for cultural diversity, as set out in the Plan Nacional de Educación y Patrimonio (2013) published by the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España. It should also be noted that, in Spain, there is a great deal of work being done on the didactic use of historical educational heritage. In particular, there is the role played by the teaching departments in educational museums, as well as the pedagogical activity taking place in early learning centres, primary schools, secondary schools (SOMOZA, 2011) and universities. Especially important are the pedagogical practices employed in universities for teaching or learning the History of Education at Educational Science faculties, designed to raise public awareness of the need to study and revitalise our educational heritage. (^{PAYÀ; ÁLVAREZ, 2013}). In addition, the growing role of ICT (information and communication technology) in Spain is ensuring the dissemination and transfer of that heritage through the worldwide web. (ALVAREZ; PAYÀ, 2013; PAYÀ; ÁLVAREZ, 2015).

In this article, we list the main paths that have been following and the most important actions going on in Spain to renew and push forward the study and dissemination of the country’s educational heritage, with the intention of showing how the historiography of educational heritage in Spain is experiencing noteworthy advances.

Beginnings and edification of Museology of Education in Spain. The leading role played by the study of historical educational heritage

Since its very beginnings, History of Education - which arose, as an academic discipline, in the 19th Century for the training of teachers - has always been a controversial field of research, subject to constant tension and change. Today, though, no-one would dispute the fact that History of Education, as an important part of human activity, is historical study which is necessary in order to comprehend the past and present of societies and of humans themselves, in concert with the study of other aspects of human life. Historically, History of Education has been a field of research that is open to other historians in general, or sector-specific historians in particular, including to different professionals in the world of education. In view of the twofold configuration of History of Education - as a discipline and as a field of research within the academic area of Educational Sciences - it can be identified as one more sector-specific history; as a historical discipline whose field of study and analysis is education, as stated by ^{Viñao (2003}). From this perspective, we cannot view History of Education merely as a disciplinary field designed to draw lessons from the past, in the form of formulae and prescriptive “recipes”. The work of the educational historian must focus on the ability to make audiences think, rethink and interpret the reality of education from a historical perspective. The purpose of History of Education is to shed light on the schooling system as it currently stands; to help people to understand that system and operate within it.

The History of Education as a field as we know it today, in terms of how it is viewed in the academic world, has undergone significant change in comparison to the parameters of the last century. The emergence of new fields of research, including the study and reconstruction of schoolroom events and strategies, means we can now carry out novel and renewed contemplations of the fact of education throughout history. The inclusion of the ethnographic paradigm is opening doors to new and promising areas of research in History of Education, which is having an undeniable impact in the epistemological enrichment of the discipline it. History of Education, alongside museology as an academic discipline, is continually revealing new revisions and a cultural recognition of schooling. (^{MOLERO; MOLERO, 2003}). The schooling system, as the source of students’ own individual culture, helps to build knowledge of the personal and collective processes taking place within their own environment. These authors agree with the view that “school has its own culture, and its historical contribution cannot be truly appreciated through the simplistic image of a sounding box for the ideological and social phenomena surrounding it”. (MOLERO; MOLERO, 2003, p. 849).

The renewal of educational historiography in general involved the prelude to a new and necessary History of Education. From the 1980s onwards, in Spain, historians began to move past the traditional form of relating history, centred on positivist paradigms. In the 1990s, new ways of looking at education in the past emerged, and it was in 1995 that Dominique Julia described school culture as a historical object, as:

A set of norms which define the knowledge that is to be imparted, the behaviours to be inculcated, and a set of practices which facilitate the conveyance of that knowledge and the incorporation of those behaviours, with those norms and practices being orientated toward goals which may vary from period to period - religious, socio-political goals or simply that of socialisation. (^{JULIA, 1995}, p. 354).

Later on, ^{Depaepe and Simon (1995}) highlighted the possibilities that this historical focus offered in helping to decipher the codes of the “black box” which was the day-to-day reality of education. As is pointed out by ^{Moreno Martínez (2009}), in the early 20th Century, the new cultural history of education - through its ethnographic and micro-historical aspects - encouraged research into the material- and immaterial culture of the school (^{YANES, 2007}), establishing it as a nascent field in historiography. In the 1980s, ^{Sacchetto (1986}) highlighted the usefulness of gleaning information from what he calls “objetos-huellas” (loosely translatable as “artefacts”), understood as historical products imbued with the cultures which shaped the school system. These artefacts are objects which tell us something about the past to which they belong. Specifically, these are amongst the questions which helped to construct a broader, overarching history of schooling.

In light of these renewed tendencies in pedagogical historiogra phy, in keeping with the ideas of López Martín (2013, p. 18), let us recognise the special interest currently held by “the study of the school as a social space which is constructed with its own culture, capable of reshaping the influx of external factors, and thus accounting for a large of part of the structure of its internal organisation”. This focus, known as school culture, has given us a new dimension in the area of teaching and research in History of Education. As Escolano states:

The material culture of the school - a sort of objective register of the so-called empirical culture of the education institutions, is the visible exponent, and also the interpreted effect, of the signs and meanings exhibited by so-called artefacts, and also the representations which reproduce or accompany them - intuible, handleable sources in which pedagogical tradition has been recorded. (^{ESCOLANO BENITO, 2007}, p. 15).

In terms of the attempt to establish relations between the study of school culture and “Museology of Education”, it is useful to lay down a few basic considerations, before stating them within the framework of History of Education. We know that the earliest museological treaties are practically coetaneous with the origin of museums. Museology is a science which studies the relations between human beings and their environment, and brings with it the expression, promotion and affirmation of various forms of identity. It involves the study of museums, and also the reflexive analysis of the museographic phenomenon. Nevertheless, museology as such, though it is a young branch of science, in continuous development and in the process of consolidation, has already covered a significant amount of ground. ^{Hernández (2007}, p. 5), points out that “museology as a new science must give us the strategy which best serves us to take care of, protect and communicate heritage”. Its inclusion on university syllabi and in post-university activities, along with a large number of specialised publications on the topic, demonstrate the sway the subject currently holds. The museum is the subject of study, both for museology and for museography, but whilst for the former, it is a formal and material object, for the latter it is a physical object to which the principles and rules governing museology are applied.

There are many research teams, societies, professional associations, etc., who are doing a fine job of promoting and driving forward the necessary museological studies. (^{LORENTE, 2012}). Undeniably, the circumstances and sociocultural projection of museums are an increasingly relevant phenomenon in today’s society, which is being studied by such disparate academic disciplines as Anthropology, Sociology, Art History, Architecture and Pedagogy, amongst many others. Museums are clearly a pluridisciplinary phenomenon.

Gradually, the organisation, structure and operation of museums have become more professional, dealing with political, cultural and social requirements, and also with ethical, didactic and communicational obligations never before encountered. In line with ^{Poulot (2011}), this author holds that belief that the analysis of the museum as an institution lies at the crossroads between Anthropology of Culture, Sociology of Work or of Organisations, and History of Objects.

It is worth also bearing in mind the contributions made by New Museology for museums in the 1960s. The steps taken by this movement gradually - or, in some cases, more radically - brought change to museums which had generally settled into the comfortable status of reference institutions, and mere containers for memory. New Museology became an important starting point for realising the change that the museum required, and has become enriched and transformed with the social- and cultural changes, and with the expectations of the audiences who use museums. (^{ALONSO FERNÁNDEZ, 2012}). It must be admitted that with New Museology and Georges Henri Rivière, emphasis was placed on the social function of the museum, on the desire to understand it as an institution in the service of society, and on its interdisciplinary nature. The museum itself had to adapt to its visitors, and attempt to hold a dialogue with the society it served. We can state that, with New Museology, more importance is attached to the relatively recent development of Museums of Education in Spain.

A little later on, Critical Museology, which had been born in the 1970s at the Reinwardt Academy in the Netherlands and remained present ever since, went beyond the communicative aspect of the institutions and the pieces, analysing the historical determinations of that quality. It arose from the persistent crisis in the concept of the museum as a space for interaction between the public and a collection, and as a consequence of a cultural policy. (^{LORENTE, 2006}). Rather than a unique interpretation of an artefact, Critical Museology opts for self-led discovery and learning on the part of each individual visitor. Critical Museology views the museum as a qualitative, networked institution, in charge of negotiating cultural meanings with the help of teams and personnel to forge relations and collaborations with social groups. It looks at the relations which museums establish with the populace, emphasising its educational, civic and social role, and stating the ways in which contexts can draw advantages and found projects which make these institutions somewhat more democratic.

Museology of Education is a young scientific discipline which includes the work of studying the specific museistic relation of people with reality and the act of education. The task of the education museologist is to establish what can be considered heritage in this environment and what cannot; what types of heritage exist and how can they be safeguarded; what is the usefulness or possibilities they offered us for research and teaching in History of Education; which audiences need to be catered for, and in what way, etc. Only what is known and valued will be protected and conserved. Museology of Education, from the material and immaterial nature of heritage, must contribute to lending value to both pretend and true stories from childhood and adolescence in school in the past. Memory is heritage, and heritage is education. Hence, neither memory nor educational heritage can be dissociated from History of Education.

In view of this outlook in museology, in the past two decades, there has been a significant development of museums in general, and Museums of Education in particular. Especially, in recent years, in History of Education, there has been an extensive movement in favour of Museology of Education, historical studies about particular eras and educational experiments and about the recovery and exhibition of the remnants of the school of the past. Education historians, in the attempt to construct this Museology of Education, are reflecting about the concept, aims and objectives that must guide the Museum of Education, and on the way how the past of education may contribute to the reconstruction of the different historical educational processes.

Museology of Education in Spain is rooted mainly in the late 19th Century, in 1882, with the creation of the so-called Museo de Instrucción Primaria (Primary Education Museum), and later the Museo Pedagógico Nacional (National Pedagogical Museum). (^{GARCÍA DEL DUJO, 1985}). From then on, right up until the present day, with certain specific stops along the way, the discipline has gradually evolved, in connection with the founding of recognised Museums of Education across the whole of Spain. It was in 2004 that Museology of Education, linked to the trajectory of new museology in Spain, it was consolidated more consistently in the country, thanks to the founding of the Sociedad Española para el Estudio del Patrimonio Histórico Educativo (Sephe)³, and its consequent support and backing for the various initiatives aimed at studying, recovering, promoting and giving a special protagonist role to educational heritage.

At present, Museology of Education in Spain as an academic discipline, is at a very important point of construction and progressive growth. Particularly noteworthy is the effort of public and private awareness-raising which is taking place in our society, helping to recover and highlight a significant number of historical educational facts that were unknown, forgotten or simply silenced. Today, Museology of Education in Spain, in relation with Didactics as a science, continues to be involved in the construction of pedagogy surrounding our historical educational heritage, with the aim of exhibiting it, teaching it, highlighting its importance and disseminating it. The purpose is to develop heritage education (^{FONTAL, 2013}) which, from an emotional and sentimental point of view (^{ÁLVAREZ DOMÍNGUEZ, 2013}), helps us to interpret and expressively seek interpretation of the historical accuracy of school education. If Museology of Education did not contribute, through Museums of Education:

to making us a little more human; if it did not bring us closer together; and if it did not break with the structures which have, for so long, served more to divide and separate people than to bring them together in brotherhood, its social function could not be realised, and it would have no true raison d’être. (^{SOLA, 2001}, p. 58).

In line with Ruiz Berrio (2006), this author is inclined to stay that at present, relations between Museology of Education and History of Education are encouraged by the nature of both disciplines and by their postmodern focus.

Over the past twenty years in History of Education, we have seen a genuine revolution in the sources on which work must be based, starting with the degree of respect gained amongst researchers for the principle of consulting not just one source, but all possible sources, and of these sources, pride of place is given to the material culture of the school: buildings, furniture, didactic material, images, etc. (^{RUIZ BERRIO, 2006}, p. 289).

As López Martín points out, the objective of research into educational heritage must focus on “puzzling out the school culture based on the interpretation of material culture”. (^{LÓPEZ MARTÍN, 2013}, p. 34). Therein lies the significant challenge faced by History of Education, with the help of Museology of Education and Heritage Education. ^{Brunelli (2014}) reminds us that the interpretation of heritage is now an emerging discipline which, making use of different teaching methods and various communication techniques, has the function of guiding the audience in discovering and defining the different heritage spaces.

Historical educational heritage as a source for research in the History of Education in Spain: evidence and breakthroughs

Today, we cannot deny that the restrictive vision of heritage - monumental and artistic - has been surpassed. (^{MAYORDOMO, 2014}). Although we belong to a society where there is a fervent drive to archive and collate everything around us, we understand that school material satisfies a series of requirements, and is therefore worthy of the treatment appropriate to a museum. (^{DACOSTA, 2008}). The study and museum curation of educational heritage today in Spain is an important field of researchers for education historians.

The schooling system as it was has left us a set of material utensils, a set of teaching materials, which is the best possible reflection of its empirical culture and of the tradition ascribed to the historical office of teacher, along with the need to learn. This material, which has traditionally been being exhibited for over a century in Museums of Education and/or School Memory Centres, enjoys the recognition of all society and of education historians, who view it as a scholarly resource. It is undeniable that the study of school materials has opened up a new historiographical field for education historians in Spain, who carefully study the way in which subjects create, construct and use the artefacts that represent the material culture of a given age. Schools have never ceased to be spaces in which material cultures are constructed, and we know that material history can only be constructed on the basis of artefacts which have their own meanings, and which we must learn to decipher. The task of the material historian is to find artefacts’ relation with their contexts of creation and use, attempting to compile an iconography of items appropriate for their roots. (^{ESCOLANO BENITO, 2007}).

Educational heritage, being the visible part of education’s past, is a useful tool which we can use to discover, study and interpret the history of educational events. This heritage is an asset, which is worthy of being publicly exhibited for all to see. Constructing and communicating the values of memory is a public responsibility, and also a task in which education historians have to play an important role of interpretation, dissemination and study of the forms and social effects of public uses of memory.

Hereafter, we shall plot and present a series of evidence and breakthroughs, which will demonstrate that the study and recovery of educational heritage in Spain is a novel field of study for education historians, which will draw the attention of multiple researchers and research teams:

Museums of Education in Spain: tradition, present and future

School objects and their iconographic representations have now come to be viewed as identifying assets and values of our social and cultural lives. Material and immaterial cultures are gaining a high level of public interest, “becoming a central objective for the strategies of recovery and exhibition of a heritage which must be preserved, studied and disseminated”. (^{ESCOLANO BENITO, 2007}, p. 16). During the phase of startup and consolidation of the national educational systems, pedagogical museums will feed on the items, images and texts which have previously been publicly exhibited at universal exhibitions, such as the Great Exhibition in Paris in 1851. (^{GARCÍA DEL DUJO, 1985}). Universal exhibitions constitute an emerging field of investigation, which is rich and attractive for historians of the school’s material culture.

The relations between museum and memory are of fundamental importance. It is impossible to conceive of a museum without the existence of memory. “The items that are conserved are capable of containing, within themselves, the collective memory of peoples, which is why all cultures consider them to be true elements of memory, representative of a way of being in, and with, the world”. (^{CARREÑO, 2007}, p. 101). In order to recover the memory of education, we need to recreate yesterday in today’s world, taking advantage of scholarly material from the past. We recognise that the accumulation of objects is not a museum’s only function, devoting itself solely to the study of memory; instead, it needs to be open to the relations of the subject with the community. A museum today is a place where new generations can recognise their present as having evolved from the past.

When we look at Museums of Education in Spain from a historical perspective, the impression gained is of the existence of an overwhelming surge in the number of museums, exhibitions and exhibition spaces devoted to the culture and memory of school as a political, social and cultural institution. In recent times, the landscape of education museums has been significantly enriched by the establishment and opening of new Museums of Education extending across the whole of Spain. These museums, which are in a phase of expansion, have not only grown in number and uniqueness, but also, they have been capable of opening up to society, renovating their exhibition spaces and discourses, and applying, and making pay, an interesting policy of cultural dissemination with a view to making the peculiarity of historic educational heritage accessible to all of society. (^{SOMOZA RODRÍGUEZ, 2011}).

Museums of Education in Spain, in addition to preserving and actively recovering educational heritage, are being widely used as a pedagogical resource for teacher training. The role of these museums is to fill in the memorial blanks concerning the school institutions by used objects passed down from yesteryear. (^{ESCOLANO BENITO, 2007}). However, they still need to continue to work with local and regional tourist networks, which help them to raise awareness of the value of a branch of museology which is not yet sufficiently well known and appreciated by society.

In Spain, on the one hand, many Education Departments in the Autonomous Communities have, at one point or another, weighed up the museistic possibilities offered by their educational heritage to create a regional Museum of Education. However, largely for financial reasons, not all cases have let to the establishment of a museum. On the other hand, thanks to many other initiatives, both public and private, various spaces of different types, where a sample of educational heritage is preserved, exhibited and broadcast. We can state that in Spain, the typology of existing Museums of Education is highly diverse. (RUÍZ BERRIO, 2006). In our case, we shall opt to highlight four types of museums, distinguishing them on the basis of the origin of their foundation and/or creation: a) Political decision (Ministries, Councils, Provincial Authorities, Municipal Authorities, etc.); b) Academic and institutional origin (universities, teacher groups, directive teams, school privy councils, school governing boards, societies, foundations, etc.); c) Private initiative. (Individuals, family, group, etc.); d) Associationism, social groups, community engagement and civil participation (groups and/or social collectives, associations and communities, and other types of civic-participation groups). Below, in an attempt to update and further previous works on this subject (RUÍZ BERRIO, 2006; ^{GONZÁLEZ GÓMEZ, 2008}; ^{CARREÑO, 2008}; ^{GARCÍA GONZÁLEZ, 2010}; ^{MORENO MARTÍNEZ, 2015}), following a substantial effort to locate resources, we present a list covering Museums of Education, Classes and/or Centres of Educational Heritage, throughout the different Autonomous Communities in Spain. This represents a large number of projects which have been realised, and which continue to employ a significant number of people to ensure a brighter future for the study, recovery, exhibition and promotion of educational heritage.

By way of conclusion: final thoughts

From the past, we have inherited a set of voices, writings, icons and objects, which are an expression of the material- and immaterial culture of the school. We need to assess these bequests with an ethnographic and micro-historical eye in order to learn the value of pedagogical memory, of its practices and discourses, its tradition and potentialities. (^{ESCOLANO BENITO, 2007}, p. 13).

The increasing study of educational heritage in Spain, and its use as a teaching- and research resource for History of Education, has demonstrated the museological and museographic potential of the heritage legacy from the school of yesteryear. This new concept of school heritage is part of a renewed view of the historiography of education, with interest focusing on the intra-history of the school - i.e. the history “within the school”. (^{LÓPEZ MARTÍN, 2001}). Its materials are the object of historical educational knowledge, and afford us a great many possibilities for research in the field of History of Education. Furthermore, they are, in their own right, resources and instruments which help us to transmit and interpret educational knowledge from history.

In a society where all objects and materials from the past are easily cast aside and destroyed, there is an urgent need, and the commitment to recover historical elements is an important task which needs to be dealt with. Education historians must make a commitment to saving and safeguarding educational heritage, by creating museum-type spaces in which to conserve it, study it and disseminate it. (RUÍZ BERRIO, 2006). However, as Escolano Benito (2007) states, the reconstruction of the past of educational institutions and the creation of centres of educational memory are only justified and legitimate if they are done on the expectation of a future for communities who invest effort in driving forward these cultural projects, rather than sticking slavishly to the ritualistic practices of the past. Thus, new Education Museums need to stay connected to research, based on curiosity about the History of Education. From these museums, as historians and as pedagogues, it is up to us to make an effort in promoting historical knowledge as the basis for wisdom. (DAPEAPE; SIMON, 2014).

In conclusion, we can state that Museology of Education in Spain is in a good state of health at present, and appears to have a bright future. It is a branch of museology which is under construction, which, alongside History of Education, can help us to better understand the world we live in, and the world of the school, “because society is present in each and every person as a whole, through language, norms, culture” (^{MORIN, 2001}) and historical educational heritage.