The origin and ideals of the modern school / by Francisco Ferrer ; translated by Joseph McCabe.

  • Ferrer Guardia, Francisco, 1859-1909.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The origin and ideals of the modern school / by Francisco Ferrer ; translated by Joseph McCabe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the right to close it, except in so far as it falsely charged the founder with crime and confiscated his property. Ferrer’s school was thoroughly rationalistic, and this embittered the clergy—for his system was spread- ing rapidly through Spain—without in the least infringing Spanish law. Further, Ferrer’s school explicitly taught children that militarism was a crime, that the unequal distribution of wealth was a thing to be abhorred, that the capitalist system was bad for the workers, and that political government is an evil. He had a perfect right under Spanish law to found a school to teach his ideas; as any man has under English or German law. The prohibited and damnable thing would be even to hint to children that, when they grew up, they might look forward to altering the industrial and political system by violence. This Ferrer not only did not teach, but strenuously opposed. We have overwhelming proof of this at every step of his later career. But he was a child of the workers, and he had a passionate and noble resentment of the ignorance, poverty, and squalor of the lives of so large a proportion of the workers. He was also an Anarchist, in the sense of Tolsto1; he