The national high school institute of Mieres 1960. Reestablishment disguised of inauguration

Abstract

In October 1960, the National Secondary Education Institute of Mieres was launched, the first expansion of the network of institutes undertaken by the Franco regime since the end of the Civil War. This research analyzes, largely from unpublished sources, the process followed for it. A long process, begun in 1938, which was materialized in the mid-1950s and meant the definitive deployment of the proactive turn of the spanish educational policy that was called extension of secondary education. From the beginning, the institute had an outstanding enrollment and brought about notable changes in the society of the region, allowing for the first time access to the baccalaureate to some boys and girls from mining families. We conclude that, despite what has been stated so far, in reality, it was not an inauguration, but rather the reestablishment of the institute created by the Republic in 1934, an issue that was practically unnoticed and relevant from the perspective of recovering democratic memory. It also had an undoubted symbolic value that it was in Mieres, the capital of the Asturian mining basin, where the Franco regime made this investment to expand the network of public secondary schools. First piece of an important educational policy program, which had an undeniable comprehensive orientation and debtor of republican initiatives, aspects scarcely reflected in historiography.