In my class we barely gave it. In the classroom, history sometimes begins in the Roman Empire and other times, when it was already contemporary history in high school, it begins with the French Revolution. The normal thing was to stay halfway, with the agenda to finish. We almost didn’t get to the Civil War and even less to 40 years of dictatorship. In the second year of high school we saw the Franco regime in full swing, but with the tranquility that came from knowing that in selectivity there would be two options: you could always choose the question from the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century. We all did it on the day of the exam, except one student, Carolina, who chose the post-war period because, fed up with shift work and soft dictationthe topic was read in one sitting. He studied it the day before and approved it.
Francoism appeared throughout the course in the teachers’ comments, but it was possible to continue secondary studies without going into details. It may have been poor planning, but, looking back now, we were going at the speed that allowed us to understand and discuss what they were telling us. The opposite would have forced us to memorize the topics and then forget them in a short time. For many of us, Francoism was above all the stories that the elderly told when they described war and hunger, when the family gathered in the summer in the cool of the street and you asked your uncle what he meant when he said that as a young man he should have been a black marketeer. Many of those uncles and grandparents have already died and no one talks about those experiences that have remained imprinted in their memories.
A growing portion of young people say they prefer dictatorship to democracy. Maybe it’s the resume. Maybe it’s the selfish way they organize algorithms on phones, capable of atrophying empathy depending on how they are used. Maybe it is better to start the course from there or maybe it is too late because the years of discredit caused by those who call educational indoctrination while they want to use the classrooms to spread their ideology have taken hold.
Perhaps it is that the referents are already different or that, when explaining history, it is necessary to influence the stories that can still be told by those to whom no one will deny what it means to live without freedom. So that they explain how women had to ask permission from their husbands and how the torture and the arbitrary persecution and the lack of plurality and rights and the powerlessness and the anger at the law of the strongest and the indoctrination of the truth and the censorship and the corruption of the usual and the homophobia and the machismo and the way today’s rights cost beatings, revenge, prison and death. Perhaps it is because those who prefer dictatorship have decided to relativize all that part that others have suffered. This is why memory is important. Regretting that past is not nostalgia, it is something else, and no one can boast of being ignorant: you just need to want to know.
