But the corrupt practices of Church and State could not be abolished as long as the overwhelming majority of the nation was densely ignorant. When it is said that something over four millions (out of eighteen millions) could read and write, one must understand what this means. I may seem to have been unjust to the Church in so heavily charging it with criminal responsibility for the ignorance of the nation—the acknowledged root of half its evils. Do not thousands of nuns and other conventual inmates spend their lives in teaching? Does not the Church provide numbers of schools, day and night, at its own expense?
It does; unhappily for Spain. These schools are made the pretext for suppressing better schools, and for making no national effort to remove the nation's shame. They are schools of the type we had in England fifty years ago. The religious organization which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, counteracted the growing demand for education in England by founding schools of its own, expressly stated that it would be careful to educate children "in their proper station," which was, in the old phrase, a condition of respectful submission to their pastors and masters. That is the direct aim of elementary education in Spain, as will be understood from our study of the character of the Spanish peasant's "pastors and masters." The child was taught to read, with fiery injunctions as to what it should and should not read. The curriculum was narrow, arid, and unstimulating. It was indeed especially devised to meet the old idea of teaching without educating. And the whole period of school-life was filled with fulminations intended to keep the child in its proper station.
Before Ferrer returned to Barcelona little bands of mutinous workers here and there had clubbed together and founded secular schools of their own. Middle-class Rationalists and Republicans took some interest in the enterprise, but the teaching—stimulating enough, in all conscience—was hampered by lack of funds. Church and State looked on with tolerable indifference at the mushroom-growths of revolt. An ex-priest who had been active in the work returned to the Church, and many little institutions were closed. Those that survived were mainly Republican
