Part Two: The Modern School & Francisco Ferrer: School Shouldn't Be Terrible

falling off and breaking themselves. But there are differences with the spandex. They're the silk. That's that's how you can tell it. Okay, okay, although silk bike Okay anyway, Um, well I would ride bike and silk now yeah yeah, someone someone send me a cape. I'll do it. Yeah. Um look that way you get the wind resistance to help keep the whole thing more stable. Yep. And you're a badass, James. How are how are you doing well? I'm good and it's been ten minutes since our last episode.

I've been thriving throughout them. Oh excellent. Who who are you? Who? That's a good question, isn't it. I am a podcaster, part of the team. It could happen here. Cool zone media journalist who writes about Nazis and cops and Nazis who are cops and conflict. And I'm a historian. I have PhD in the history of anti fascist physical culture, which is cool. Our producer is the one and only

Sophie Lichtman, who was also the only Sophie Licterman. I think, so, why did you check out the curse word that you have in the script? I like that that's true. I'm true. I'm sorry. In the script it says our producer is Sophie fucking Lictorman. And you know, I feel like I really defanged you in a way I shouldn't have. She had to go through a lot of ship to get that added to her government name. I know, I know.

It's retty fine every time she entity country. Yeah, and sometimes you call Sophie just Sophie instead of Sophie fucking Lectman, and Sophie gets really upset, like you all just went to fairy dies. Yeah, furious. Our audio editor is ian legally distinct from the entity that is currently battering the west coast of Florida. And it's always funny to make fun of people's names because it's something that is always original, like before I think before recording I accidentally anyway, and

our theme music is written by a woman. Today we're talking about education. That's where you take podcast hosts and you say making fun of people's names isn't as funny as you think, and then they learn and then they don't do it again. And that's what we all need in this world. Education that thing that you added. When you advocate for it, you might get murdered by the Spanish crown. Last week we talked to Last week we talked about Paul Robin and his orphanage and the creepily

named but actually cool the Hive. And today we're going to talk about the modern school, which is kind of a meaningless name. Right, Like whenever people are like modern and then people are like modern means fifty years ago, and you're like, that doesn't make any sense. I don't get it anyway. That's the context in which the modern school is modern. This is not modern anymore. I'm really stretching this out. I forge if I do it long enough,

Sophie laugh. Okay, it worked, Um, I was telling my friend that I was going to write about for Their Francisco for the person we're gonna be talking about who helped found the modern school, and they summed up like this, There once was a guy in Spain named Francisco for Their, and he was like, what if we teach kids in a reasonable way? So the government shot him and left him in a ditch. Yeah, funk, that's Javis jay Z that. Yeah. Yeah,

there's no there's or to it, but they're not fundamentally wrong. No, it's pretty much see and the narrative arc that we've got for you today, isn't it. Yeah, yeah, with some like you know, the whole cool thing about being a murdyr as your ideas live longer than you and we're all going to die one day anyway, so you know, mm hmm. So let's talk about Francisco FIDN. And actually I think you know some of the stuff that we're

gonna get into. I feel like you maybe wrote a PhD about in terms of the time period and stuff, and so please feel free to well I guess you do that anyway, but I'm particularly excited about anything you might have to say about early nineteenth century Spain or early twentieth century Spain. So Francisco FDN was born on January tenth, eighteen fifty nine, on a farm outside Barcelona, to devout Catholic parents. Like all of the rest of the heroes this week, well, they weren't all born on

a farm outside of Barcelona. They might have been that, but that's not information I have. So Francisco did not

grow up excited about religion. At the very least. I think he had um like some free finger some stuff, and his family, like one of his uncles, was a free thinker, and at the very least, by the time he was twenty four in eighteen eighty four, he was a Freemason, which is an incredibly complex topic that I'm not going to talk about today, which is when you say it now and people are like, oh, some weird person, you know, conservative or something, but at the time meant

often the opposite of that. He was a radical Republican, again in the we don't like King's way, and he was anti clerical, and not in that he doesn't like the D and D class cleric. I don't know his thoughts one way or the other about the dungeons and dragons class cleric, but instead referring to a society that is not run by monolithic church organization called the Church.

It's important to understand the Catholic Church in Spain during this time because it wasn't like like now, like you know, okay, actually Catholicism continued continue to do a lot of ship, but you know, it's like Catholicism in nine at this time period in Spain is not like just the fun religion where you drink blood and there's incense and you say you're sorry for doing all the sins or whatever.

The Church was a force of oppression in a country that was usually some kind of monor key, and Francisco did not like what was happening there. It's my long way of yeah, I'm actually curious. I think that's pretty the Spanish Church sucked to a degree that is sort of hard for us to fathom. Now. I think like the Spain, Spain doesn't have like a this argument that gets made right. They like, Spain is not a nation.

People don't conceive of themselves of Spanish and Catholicism takes over instead so that their identity is as Catholic and that's what Franco manipulates, and it's why there's this debate about whether Franco is fascist or not right because he has this whole national Catholic thing, whereas it's largely just national race in other places. And so, yeah, the Spanish Church are a lot of land it is. It goes

hand in hand with with landlords. It goes hand in hand with the violent repression of working class movements, and it is hated more than you can perhaps imagine, Like if you look at uh, like anti clerical violence and violence by the church at the start of the econod wor and I'm sure we'll talk about like the tragic week today and you will see, like you give anyone half a fucking chance and like a mag dick, and they will burn the funk out of a church often.

Actually it's really interesting because sometimes they they object to like the institution of the church and that the bad ship that it does. Sometimes you will get priests who are not total pieces of ship, who are also willing to help poor people in their parish right, So sometimes they go next door and burn the church instead of instead of the church nearest to their house, they burned

the other church. But yeah, the church, like in when you in the July start of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, like all the bell towers have snipers in them, when the when the military does a coup, right, because the church goes hand in hand with the people who are killing the working class in the street. Yeah, yeah,

not best friends, church and the people. Yeah, it's someone presented it to me and as this idea that like, imagine if the Christian nationalists are currently trying to take over the United States had already taken over the United States, you know, and obviously that's not they're not Catholics, right, they often hate Catholics, but that same religious framework, that same religious cultural and perical domination, church and state go hand in hand, like yeah, and there they notice scent

could be tolerated. So Francisco for there, he doesn't like any of this stuff. And so in his job, he's a railroad conductor, which is objectively cool because trains are cool. I don't know if you knew this, but trains are cool. And he used that position to help exiled revolutionists, which

is even cooler. There was this radical Republican guy named Manuel ruiz Zodiya, who had been prime minister for a hot minute about fifteen minutes earlier, and at this point was an exile in France, trying to foment revolution in Spain so that Spain could be a republican instead of a monarchy, which they had later pull off for less than two years in eighteen seventies. This is not a we're not gonna go two into that, but our man Francisco he couriered letters to Zodia and he helps smuggle

people across the border. And then in eighteen eighty six, which is the cool thing to do with the train conductor, right, like I don't know, I just I like this idea of being like, oh, I'm just the whatever, I'm the train guy. In six all the Republicans tried to overthrow the monarchy and they failed. They had actually tried two years earlier too. There's a lot of various Uh, there's a lot of revolutions that Spain tries in all kinds of directions. Yeah, and so they failed pretty spectacular in

eighteen eighty six. So Fair and his wife and his three daughters they funk off to Paris and self imposed exile because they know what's up right, And he spent sixteen years in France, and he's working unpaid for most of that, for a good chunk of that for Zodia, and as a secretary, and he's teaching Spanish as his day job. And he's selling wine, not as like a wine merchant, but as like a wine in vendor, like he's on commission. I think, okay, um, he's just doing

whatever the funk he can. He's working class guy. Yeah, and he's involved in everything cool and lefty in Paris at the time, including the free thought movement, which is, you know, the freethinkers, not quite atheists and like all people value In the eighteen nineties France, he was involved in the Dreyfist campaign trying to stop anti Semitism in France, and then Zodia died and so Francisco in Francisco is like, well, well fuck, that was like my things. I was trying

to help this prime minister guy. It's like Francisco Freday, he's like a Bernie guy, right, He's like, I'm going to fucking help Bernie if Bernie was trying to overthrow the United States America, and well, which he is. Oh yeah, that's true. So we're not supposed to stay that on the podcast, right, Um, okay. So so he starts hanging out with the anarchists now that Bernie's dead, and he

starts getting really into pedagogy because he's a teacher. He's teaching Spanish for most of his money, and and he's interested in how to teach things and how to develop

freethinking individuals. So soon enough he's corresponding with our guy, Paul Robin, the French guy from one of the two French guys from the last time the guy ran the orphanage, and he starts dreaming of how he's going to found a liberal, a libertarian school with boys and girls learning in the same classes, with lessons based on science instead

of the blood drinking cannibal cult. And Spanish folks have been trying for years to get some decent education for the working class, and he's like, I'm going to be part of that dream. You know, he's not the only guy who's like, I'm gonna fix the educational system in Spain, but he's he's thinking about it all the time. Education in Spain in the nineteenth century was sucking awful. Most people couldn't read. It was like about two thirds of

people couldn't read. Most towns didn't have a public school. Once again, about two thirds of towns didn't have a public school, and most teachers were sworn to uphold Catholic dogma, and there would be like diet in this or whatever. Like church people would be like walking around being like, you better teach the right things, you know, because they live in this like fucking weird dystopia that I didn't

quite realize. Spain was such a fucking weird anyway, And people are getting sick of all this ship right, and they want change. And so for decades, Republicans and anarchists and just not the church people had been starting schools, but they kept getting crushed by the state. And so for air, he's like, I want to give it a shot to write. If only he had some money, and he got money in one of the classic ways that radicals get money. Have you heard of how he got

his money. I'm just curious, kind of curious, though I don't think I have. No, he's slightly before my time period, Like he dies about twenty years before my stuff sted. No, that's a good point, okay, Or does he what if he's in the blood drinking cult? Okay, so yeah, then he comes back to life. Yeah, lady finds him. It's the whole thing. Yeah, Easter eggs because of it. Yeah, yeah,

you're familiar. Yeah. So he's like, I need some money, and he's teaching Spanish to all of these people, including a like the way that this is written in history, um is and whatever. I always think there's something going on beyond of the history when people are like and then this thing happened that the clearest obvious answers either crime and or sex work or some sort of combination

of the too. Francisco for the is a Spanish teacher, and he has a student who is a rich, middle aged lady and two quote historian Paul Average, she'd been a woman of conventional outlook until Fredair, a persuasive teacher, succeeded in converting her to his ideas, and when she died, she left him half of her estate. Okay, yeah, he's what the contemporary discourse we called a gold digg. Yeah. I think he gold dig that money up, which is a valid way to go and get a million. Yeah yeah,

proud of him. Yeah, so he gets his he gets his million francs and the nineteen O one he moves back to Barcelona. I have literally no, I should have looked it up. I'm like Frank's to modern dollars. I don't know, gets a bunch of money. Yeah, it takes a long time to do those conversions I had. Yeah, I know, I always do them when I do like dollar, but when I do currencies that don't exist anymore, it's

really hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's yeah, it's you can sometimes find The quickest way I found was to find the newspapers from that date, Like if you find something in the New York Times archive and then you look at the exchange rates that date, and then you go that day's dollars to today's dollars. That's how you gets give the euro. Yeah, that's how you got the PhD. It was yeah, that was it. They were like that I had to give someone. Actually I didn't have to

give him any money. Some money had to move around from a donor a donor to an institution that fundamentally sucks. Yeah, okay, M sorry. So In he moves to Barcelona and he's going to open a school, and he knows that UM wrote memorization isn't the same thing as learning. He wants to tear down the division between education and play, which is kind of some what you're talking about, like sport and play, right, Yeah, And he wants to cultivate physical

and mental development. He wants to foster self realization. He wants that teachers should help students discover things, not convince them of things. So he starts to school where he wants a school where there's no discipline, no rewards, no yelling at kids, no arbitrary rules, no homework, no forced working in silence. Uh, no teaching as competition through grades and ship. Everyone is only competing against them themselves. Right. He's flush with cash, so he starts a school of

moderna the modern School. It's based on these principles. He starts with thirty eight students, but by five years later it has a hundred and twenty six students. And the stated purpose was to educate the working class in a rational, secular, and non coercive setting. And I've read different ideas about how this worked in practice. I've read that the tuition was based on the parents ability to pay, so it's

like super sliding scale. But other places I've read have claimed that only the leftist middle class was able to afford to send their it's there. I don't know further in all of those explanations, there's like a clear bias. This is one of the things that really annoys me about. You know, there's clear biased where they're like it was perfect in every way and everyone you know, and you're like, was it And then on the other side you have like, but it was just some elitea ship and fuck them

and you know whatever. Um, And both of those histories I read that claimed one thing or the other seemed really fucking biased. Um. Yeah, these like hag geographies, Yeah, totally well fortunately, um, I would never do a hagiography. I would never name my podcast of something like cool people. And I will just say completely honestly and truthfully that Francisco Ferrare not only umu was it sliding scale, but it was actually sliding scale. Bout how much money he

gave to the parents for sending their kids there. Um no, wait, no, that makes them buying children, Okay, So students would visit um okay, and so like and like field trips were a big part of all of this, like popular education and like libertarian schooling, and it always gets brought up in this way where I'm like, Oh, I think that maybe because I grew up with field trips in public

school here in the United States. Um, it's like one of the only things out of all of these things that I experienced, right, Um, boys and girls taught in the same classroom and field trips. But the way it talks about it, I get the feeling that field trips were not a big part of nineteenth century public school. No, I don't think so. I think especially like when you look at uh, like the British quote unquote public school,

which actually meets private school. Yeah, yeah, good stuff. It's I think the idea was to like sequest to young men away from the corrupting influences of the city have been in these kind of semi rural of suburban schools

where they could just like practice being soldiers. Oh is that what I guess because I've always been There's been a couple of things that confused me, and one of them is the private school means public school and in Britain, yeah, it's tod stinguish it from a I think it's to from a grammar school, which is actually a school that is free, but you have to pass an exam to get into it when I think they also perhaps no, I'm trying to remember, so, like some schools had like

classical and modern curriculums, but I think that was within public schools. Wait in public school means private Wait, public school is a is a specific class of private schools, a special kind of elite class of private boarding schools. Yeah. Yeah, we are a country which has really made it as hard as possible to understand our ship. Yeah, it's the boarding schools. Like they're they're a kind of wide variety of them, or it's not a wide variety of them.

They're pretty pretty consistently for wealthy people, right, But like eaton is the one that, like if you're thinking of one, like when all our fucking primate or a decent chunk of our prime ministers all went to the same school, she's weird. And some people would think that is a problem, but not Britain, because we love class and that is that eaten? Is that like a thing that is eaten? Yet that's where the royal family go, It's where fucking

prime ministers go. Yeah. Yeah, and not a problematic system at all. It's a great one. It doesn't reward privilege. It's fine. Yeah, they do have a form of folk football that they play there, But I would argue that you have removed the folk element from anything more than most people earn in a year to go there. Yeah, I mean there's the like, you know, the richer free

kind of thing. You know, you're like, oh, yeah, you get to do all this, Like like there's a lot of a lot of the stuff that I'm reading about about the educational system. There's a lot of private schools in the US that do this kind of thing, right, and that rules, and I'm glad for that, but I'm like, I'm bummed that it's not in the public schools, you know, yeah, yeah, it seems to be. I know, when I was like applying for teaching jobs, this was a sort of ship.

I really wanted to do them very I left the outdoors and obviously like exercising and ship. And then you look at these schools and you're like, it's not the kind of thing I want to do, though, because you know, we cost so much money, and like you're only getting one the people who benefit from perhaps not the people who would benefit from most. And it's not a reasonable pross section of society. Yeah, it's a shame. I think some of them still exist in Barcelona, writes some of

these more modernist schools. I think. So I'm going to talk a little bit at the end about what I've learned about what still exists. Um, it's like weird versions of different things. But but yeah, so we're not there. Yeah. So at the modern school, kids get field trips, this wild crazy idea where they're like, what if we learned things by going to the places where those things are done? And so they'll they'll go to like and this is such a like workers like nineteenth century or twenties century

Spain thing. It's like they visit factories and also laboratories and museum m and nature and all of that. But I just love that they like to go visit factories and shipp too. Yeah, and parents were invited to to come to lectures at the school because basically, like at night and at the in the evenings, parents could come and learn about things. And one of the things that they could learn about is the products and services that support this podcast. Really yeah, they there was like a

weird portal to the future that Francisco Fair developed. Um, that's actually One of the things he's less known for is the the their paradox that allows educational material to come from the future. Unfortunately, he didn't understand the modern advertising landscape well enough, and so people have been able to game the air paradox algorithm to bring advertising the minds of early twentieth century Spanish radicals. That's a great consumer base. That's what ranks it truly modern. Yeah exactly.

That is actually where it got the name modern. Is it always is attached to whatever is the current real time because we live in the real time lane that they live in the past, which is fake. Um, much like the fake ads and no um, it's true the happiness that you gain from these products and services, yeah exactly, So go out and consumee. Actually, it's funny, is like, when I listened to this podcast, it's mostly adds for other podcasts, which is totally chill. Yeah, I mean all

of us chill. I love everyone who's ever Okay, here's some ads, buy some gold, and we are back and we're talking about how greatly we personally endorse every single advertisement that has ever been put on this show in any region. And if you have any problems with anything that we have personally selected to put on as advertisers. You can direct those questions to me at on Twitter at I write, okay, yeah, so this message here there anyway, Uh,

they have field trips. Oh, and the teachers get to or parents get to come and continue do continuing education for free. And I don't know. And and the thing that once again I like it is this thing that comes up at time and time again that the coolest ratist ship, like all the coolest ratist groups, basically offer

culture to people without money. Right. And so he also in order to because he's always thinking bigger than just like oh, and so just being teacher, he wants to develop a new school system, and in order to develop a new school system, he also needs all new types of stuff. So he needs a school to teach teachers. So he starts at a school to teach teachers at the modern school. And he also starts a textbook printing press,

because of course he did. He reached out to scientists and writers and shipped all over Europe so that the school had all the latest scientific information. They printed like forty of these textbooks in the five years of the school ran. And and they also published utopian children's books, including one that was called The Adventures of No No, which was written by an anarchist named Gean Grave. And I have no idea if this book was actually good.

The history book I read was like it was the most popular book among this students, but I don't know, maybe, like,

maybe it was awful. I don't know. This is this school I think aired a little bit more on the side of like, we are an anarcho syndicalist project who will create the working class that will overthrow the bourgeoisie, rather than like, I think the school is great, but in that spectrum I was talking about earlier, between like your soul goal is freethinking individuals versus your like soul goal is like making anarchists or whatever, right, right, I

think this one leaned a little bit more towards the indoctrination. But again I don't know, because half the ship that's written about this unlike the other ones that are obscure enough that the people who wrote about them in a modern sense or like these rule all the ones. A lot of the people who write about the ship in the modern sense are like, we fucking hate these people, you know, Yeah, right, And then it's just a way to I have encountered those people in my historical academic Yeah. Yeah,

pair reviews a great system. It does not read force what. Yeah, I actually have reproductions of some of those pedagogical texts that I was. I wasn't just a really chest slightly yeah, like, um, oh cool some of these titles. Yeah. So it's it's a series called Texas Decktoria Sport. So it's in Catalan, um, and they were made by the Catalan government. But like, um, you can kind of see all these reproductions here. These were given to me by a friend. I don't know how.

I don't know how, like how possible it would be for people to obtain these, but yeah, it's pretty cool, like you can see. Um, like I'm just looking like the summary informing of the goals of Physical Culture education, right, Like it's like things that are of use for like a healthy body, things sort of used for a healthy mind, like things that are of use in the workplace. So it's it's interesting to see them like categorized physical culture. Not until put the ball in the hole, score the point,

you know, get a brain injury. Um, Like it's it's interesting to see them. The characterized physical culture in ways to develop a healthy body, mind and you know, a fulfilling way to make a living. It's interesting because a hundred years later we're sort of back to kind of, at least in the United States, just sort of discovering that concept again. It's like holistic idea of like actually moving your body and things as goals besides just sports. And you know, I don't know, um yeah, I don't

know what the case is here. I imagine it's the same because capitalism likes to do this. But in Britain, certainly, many of our schools have been like they've they've sold off like the places that used to be their playing fields. No, like kids don't get to play outside, and actually that's a very important part of learning how to be part of a democratic society. Yeah. No, And and I mean more of the like kind of the radical concept of like, you know, people should go and exercise and that's like

part of their like developing a healthy mind. And I don't know, I mean it leads down this also this rabbit hole of like standing desks are okay, and treadmill desks which are okay, but they're also like this thing that whatever quite dystopian, isn't it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's see these kids on treadmill desks in the cars room. But yeah, like just to get up and move around.

Like I even I remember when I was doing Pettigo G training, you know, ten years ago something that like it was still pretty radical to be like fucking get out from behind the pantheon where you teach and everyone moves around, and you know, even though it's better. One of the other things that they taught at this school is I think everyone learned Esperanto, which was the leftist idea of Hell, yeah, Esperanto is fucking great, and I okay,

I love this ship off now. It's like, I don't I think it's so wonderful, right that there was a time when the working class was like, we all need to work together to make a language so we can all understand each other, and that will help us to understand each other better, to have more unity, to ferment revolution and build a world where the working class can be united and look after itself and we cannot versus like this sort of idea of nations and languages and

monolithic language blocks from one group being pitched against another group and I'm not understanding each other because they can't

talk to each other. And like so at the Popular Olympics right in nineteen thirty six, and the last surviving Popular Olympian died last year, and he was an esperantist his whole life, right, So like, yeah, he's born in the nineteen twenties, right, he dies in a lot of shit, but like I was, so I tried to correspond with him, and the only way can correspond with him with through the Esperanto society. And like I'm not an esperantist myself,

but I was. I met all these people who were, and there was so inspirational to me, like the sayda that like we're going to talk together, we're going to play together, and we're going to change the worlds that we all understand each other. It's so cool, Like I really love this idea of instead of like you learned my language so you can talk to me, and we learned this language that we all share and then we can all talk to each other. And yeah, it's just

I don't know, I'm really sad that obviously. And Esperanto is like designed to be very easy to understand, easy

to learn, right, particularly complex language. But yeah, they had Esperanto translators at the at the Popular Olympics, and that the idea was that like, if two people didn't have a translator who could go between them, that they could just use an esperantist as a passed through right totally, And and one of the things I I haven't studied as much about Esperanto as I would like, And so maybe this is a bit my own conjecture of my

own projecting onto it. But one of the things that struck me about at least the people I talked to about it, was that it wasn't meant to be everyone's only language, or at least a lot of people. It

wasn't meant to be your only language. You still speak whatever language you're from, but then the internation sal communication happens in this language that is no one's mother's tongue, mother tongue, and so you avoid this like you know more and more, like English is the quote universal language in a lot of places and a lot of context, and and since it's some of ours, like native tongue, you get this like fucking problem where you get this

more you know, cultural colonialism and all this ship. Um, yeah, and so I find us Bronto. Yeah, Like, I don't know whether it's like the thing that I'm trying to be, like let's bring back us Toronto, but yeah, but it it was really interesting. One of the things that really strikes me whenever I read some of this history is I'm like, oh, the radical left was better at internationalism

before the fucking Internet. Not because the Internet killed it, but just because the way that the movement prioritized communications. You would have people like in Brazil commenting on labor struggles in Japan, you know, commenting on Portuguese and having it have an impact on the decisions that some of the Japanese labor struggle people are doing, you know, and like, I don't whatever not to get lost in We can do it again. We can do it by paying attention

to each other. So yes, esperanto. Big thing the modern school and and the whole modern school was not a modest idea. I feel like a lot of the other people were like, oh, I'm going to teach some kids, and other people might want to do it, but I was like, this is the whole thing is couched and revolutionary terms. The goal is to develop the kinds of people who could make a better society, people who are

constantly improving themselves. And it was consciously part of the larger and archo syndicalist movement, the one that later saw millions of workers taking over their factories into a collectivized economy. So, you know, in some ways, I'm not saying the modern school did that right, but it consciously saw itself as we're going to be helping people I don't know become the people who can make the world better. The government, they weren't really into this. Oh yeah, which, to be fair,

I guess was mutual. Right. Sometimes I'm like, oh, the state's so mean to these people who actively are attempting to destroy this. Know, I guess that's fair. Y cops raided his house all the time, they followed him around all the fucking time, and they also spread rumors about him. They were really into spreading rumors that he like gambled and had loose morals. Um to be fair, he did

fuck like a lot. And then but we're just in line with his like his his particular moral structure, without mean anything wrong with that, right, right, No, totally, And within the context of the social movement he was part of I'm not aware of people being particularly upset. Well, okay, I'll get to one person, but but overall, like no, it was like, um yeah, I mean there there were arguments within the left and anarchism at that time about like the free love and about essentially what you would

probably call polyamory now and stuff like that. There are arguments back and forth. But like, he wasn't breaking his own morals. But the government was like, we are going to paint this man as horribly as we can, and you will soon see why they did all of this work. In five someone threw a bomb at the King's carriage. It injured seventeen people. Then, in nineteen o six, one of the school's textbook printers, who was a twenty year old guy named Matteo Morale, he tried to murder the

King and Queen of Spain on their wedding day. He it starts off classy. He put a bomb into the into a bouquet of flowers and tried to drop it on the wedding procession. It wasn't a good plan. It was really actually pretty shitty. He killed twenty four onlookers. He injured a hundred and seven people, including all of the people who were on the balconies below him, and he didn't so much as touch the King and queen.

Apparently the the queen's wedding dress was covered in the blood of the horse, so not well whatever, I think my opinion about random bomb means is pbably pretty known at this point and mateo, he did this possibly because

he was love sick. He propositioned one of the women at the school, one of the teachers, who was probably fucking for their Oh, who's like, and I think she's I think like she's way older than this twenty year old and she's way younger than for their And she said no, and he was like, fuck it, I'm gonna try and kill the king. And I don't know if this was like to impress this lady or not. Big John Henley movie, Yeah, yeah, exactly so John Henkley, he takes to the wind and he was spotted at a

train station. It was as simple as a Spottish trains. This is a massive nationwide man hunt to find him, and he was like he was in a region where he had an accent, and the fact that he had like disheveled clothes really like had him stand out or whatever.

So yet he gets spotted at a train station, they come for him, he shoots the cop that's coming for him, and then he kills himself, and the cops arrested for their for conspiracy, and they held him in prison for fucking year before they finally gave up trying to find evidence against him because there wasn't any evidence against him. And this huge international support campaign came up around around this because it was just like, why then are you

resting this guy? But the cops shut down the Modern School like two weeks after they arrested him, and it was had only been open for five years. It actually never reopens, this this thing that looms large and a lot of like popular education, but it only existed for five years. And the right wing breeze this a sigh

of relief because the Modern School fucking terrified them. One right wing paper put it like this quote, these crimes will continue as long as Spaniards maintain the freedom to read, to teach, and to think, from which come all these anti social monsters. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, yeah, I think we need to put any commentary on that. And Spence so so some folks, I don't know, they tried to get all the secu so some of the right wing people, they tried to get all the secular schools

shut down as a result as well. They were like, yeah, let's shut down all of the ones that aren't Catholic, right, and that didn't pass. Um and historians, both anarchists and non anarchists, like to argue about whether or not Francisco had actually plotted the attack. I don't think he did personally. I think that because all of the evidence that they have is all the evidence that wasn't even enough for

this right wing court to use against him. Right. But but this is where we start to get two different pictures of who Francisco was. On one side, publicly, at this point, he's actually he maintains that he's a pacifist and it's not even really an anarchist, even though he's like and he's just committed to libertarian education. But the reason that I and many historians feel safe continue to call an anarchist, even at this point, he's like, oh,

I'm not an anarchist anymore, is it. He's like, he's not just running this school, but he's like contributing to all the anarchist newspapers, and he's like doing all this anarchist organizing or explicitly anarchist ory, and he's like a big part of the synarcho syndic Actually he's a big part of a syndicalist union that includes anarchists and socialists. And but he's like, oh no, I'm just a teacher guy. That's like his kind of take. And I think it's

his take because what we'll get to that. And on the other side, he was a bloodthirsty, mad bomber who just wanted to see the guts of kings painting the walls of Madrid. You know, um I, that's not the problem. The problem needs to pull by standers, absolutely, way absolutely uh not a very the track record of throwing bombs at people you don't like it doesn't work for governments when they do it in other countries. It doesn't work. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, Which is an awkward transition into

our our main sponsor of this show. Um uh the circle bomb. Have you ever had a problem that you don't know how to? No, No, the bombs. I think they're rebranded as obomba sphere. Okay, what about just like bouquets of flowers? Without bombs in them. Okay, disappointing, Okay, No, no, because like, okay, think about it, because like it's actually really nice. Like when my book came out, someone gave me a bouquet of flowers and it made me really happy.

I almost cried and it didn't have a bombinate. And think about how much worse that would have been if someone was like, congratulations on your book release, and then they gave you bouquet flowers and there was a bombinate. That'd be bad. It would either way, you're inviting death

into your home. Yeah, foers, there there is there a positive product that you would like to that you would like to be the sponsor of this episode A lot of time, as we we we previously have been sponsored by the concept of potatoes, the concept of clean tap water, a always cool pillow, um, a really good comb, smiling children, smiling children. I'd like it to be sponsored by like

the idea of bicycles, because it's great. I feel like you're flying while you're still on the ground, and they can empower people to travel and see the world and meet each other. So yeah, bicycles, I think, alright, no particular type of bicycles, Yeah, no, absolutely. Not. Incidentally, bicycles in the early twentieth century were used a lot to spread socialist Mannichism because he's left wing. Cycling groups would travel around rural areas reading prudon and marks through megaphones.

That's so, that is so weird. You should do it now, but don't expect positive results because it will just confuse everyone. But the world should be a little word. Yeah, do that. And here's some other ads. And we are back and we're talking about whether Francisco Frere is a mad bomber or a pacifist. And my answer, my guests, is that

he's somewhere but ween these two. Uh. He absolutely was affiliating with the broader anarchist movement, and that included pacifist elements, right like Tolstoy, friend of the acts, one of the main accidental friends of the pod, someone who just shows up in every episode. The three things will show up in every episode by accident are Quakers, which aren't in this one. I'm sorry, tuberculosis, which is in everyone because death weights for all of us, including Flowers and Tolstoy.

But Tolstoy big part of supporting the libertarian school movement. UM he would send all kinds of money and like wrote about it, and I think started some of these schools. And I kind of want to when I one day do a Tolstoy episode, which will I have to include also all the terrible things that Tolstoy did. But anyway, so he's he's at least friends with some pacifists like Tolstoy, but he's also clearly hanging out with the more revolutionary anarchists.

And this is the this is the fourth attempt by the Spanish state to claim he'd plotted an assassination. Even he got played for the nineteen of five bombing, the nineteen six bombing and to two attacks before then. They were like any time any one tried to do something in Spain, they were like a Francisco for there is behind it. And every time everyone's like, why are you saying that? Because he teaches kids, and they're like no, no, no, because he tried to kill them, you know, and there's

like just no fucking evidence. Ever, Um, they really wanted him gone, which I think I assume is why he was like, I'm not even an anarchist anymore, I'm a pacifist. It's because like they kept trying to fucking murder him. So he's out of prison. He doesn't have a school anymore. He's banned from opening it again, but other people are kind of doing that ship now, and Francisco forms the straightforwardly named International League for the Rational Education of Children.

I think this podcast is really actually sponsored by everyone on both all sides of things should go back to naming their organizations the League of something something m H. He travels around Europe. He's talking about all this ship. He keeps printing textbooks for all the other libertarian schools that are starting to crop up. He starts a newspaper to discuss pedagogical ideas to be the equivalent of starting

like a discord. At this point, I think we should be like, one day someone's going to be like, ah, yes, James Stout did a lot of work about physical education once started a discord. You know, yeah, I am permanently banned from discord. Actually yeah, I sent a big video of my chickens and it was like you're on something really weird, and it banned me. And what was the chicken's name? That was Emma Goldham. We also have Wraiths Featherspoon.

They were just enjoying a mango and of all the ship that happens on Discord, I am the one who gets ip band it's wild. I understand my bands from Twitter for responding to tweets with pictures of Mussolini hanging upside down dead like I can see where people might get upset by that. I will continue you to do it like you can. You can. Don't never take my freedom, but I see. And in the last few weeks particularly, it's been very hard to restrain myself. But okay, yeah,

discord not cool with chickens. Why does something happened in the past few weeks that's somehow relates to Italy and fascism? Yes, quite possibly a girl boss was winning and the Internet hates to see a girl boss winning. That's right, Internet does a girl boss that And I have positive feelings about hierarchy and right wing politicians who use identity in order to so um so the league starts, it spreads from country to country, and that group we hive, the hive,

the awkwardly named one maybe the cool name. When someone listening this is like, that's the coolest name, and that's fine. Yeah, these are pretty cool. Yeah, like they you know, they work together, they get stuff downe authoritarian, that's true, but you know, I mean, who had okay whatever, like the simple okay whatever. There's some joke there that I don't know how to make. So the hive joins this league, and libertarian education becomes all the rage, and schools are

cropping up all over the place. And then in nine Francisco went back to jail because you see, Spain was a colonial power and they've been losing colonies all over the place, but they still had Morocco. But in nineteen o nine they were losing bad in Morocco. They started calling up the reserves to go do a colonialism, and James people didn't want to do a colonialism. Yeah, I know. I would like to say it was because they were all committed anti racist and anti colonialism. I think that

was part of it. I think mostly someone said, you there, soul, bread winner for your family, we would like you to go die in some country for no fucking good reason.

I don't know, that's my take on it. I'm curious if you know this has never happened again in history, fortunately, But yeah, well, I mean there is an element that is like anarchism anarchism anarcho syndicalism are much much more relevant than the like communism in Catlan, labor organizing at this time and since this time, until the nineteen thirties.

So like, there's an element that I'm sure it's committed to anti colonialism that exists within the Catalan left, but I think the larger idea being like, I don't want to go and die so someone else can make some money. I don't want to participate in war, which is scary, and you know, there is no veterans pension, there's no v a right. You might come back with one less leg,

but they're not going to help you. And if you're going to go and die in Morocco fighting the riff, why not die in the street in Barcelona trying to stop it? Being the case that the state can force you to go to Morocco and fight the riff, which which is more or less how it goes down. A lot of people made that decision and had that end result.

Syndicalas called for a general strike on July. The government responded in the same way that they've responded to every strike so far in this episode and pretty much every strike I've covered on the show by firing on people for being on strike then declaring martial law. So the general strike became an insurrection because they were like, we don't actually want martial law. We want to continue to have power over our own lives, and they didn't want

to fucking go invade Morocco. And this gets called the Tragic Week. More than a hundred people die at the hands of the police, about eight cops get got to and as far as I can tell, one of the kind of interesting things about it, like the Syndicalus were one of the main organizing bodies behind it, but it was Republicans and liberals and Cantalan nationalists and socialists and anarchists, and it was it was fairly spontaneous, is at least the read I've I've gotten, And I'm wondering if that

maps to here. Yeah, there's always been some links towards these people, right, like, and some of these people like end up on the on the other side. And when we get to the Spanish Civil War, right, but these people always had these uneasy alliances, right that, like, especially the Catalan nationalists and the anarchists, right, so compounds who's the president one of a better term of Catalonia when

the civil war starts. Had previously been a lawyer for anarchists who were facing the same state persecution, right and and Catalonia like certainly by the nineteen thirties develops, and maybe in part because of the Tragic Week, and because as Catalan nationalists, even if they were bourgeois, which they mostly were, they were familiar with the concept of being ruled by an hoblitary power that you didn't choose, in

this case Madrid. A lots of them felt that like it should be the other They didn't particularly feel that there should be self determination for nations. Some did, but many of them just felt like it should be the other way around, that Barcelona should rule Madrid and not Madrida. So they weren't even as they were just supremacists. Yeah. Yeah, Catalonia was much more economically advanced than Madrid at this time, right,

much more industrialized. Catalonia, the basqu country outstripped, which is why you have this working class where you have these unions, when you have this organization, right, and many of the working class weren't born in Catalonia, didn't speak Catalan. They often called them later chapnego is kind of a slurd that's used more fiano, like they're like pretending they're from mercia Um, part of Spain. Like there you can see science in front of these like shanty towns to develop

around the factory. You can see pictures of them saying like Catalon, your ends here, Martha starts here. Well, okay, so sometimes they would be complete turned to one another. But then yeah, when there comes a chance to take a swing at the Spanish state, particularly when the Spanish state is in the form of monarchy, there's a whole lot of people who are just going to join in and be like, yeah, suck it. Oh, put that aside for now, let's go. Yeah, it didn't go incredibly well

in the end. Um. Thus the name Tragic Week, which is what I pitched as the name of this podcast, is the Tragic Podcast Week podcast. Sophie's um looking confused. No, I could be a new weekly show, the Tragic Week this week and bad stuff bummer Town. Yeah, what if I pivot to something totally What if I start talking about bad Okay? Anyway, so people get indicted for this rebellion and the anarchists they tried four times previously to

frame up Francisco Fredair. He's one of them, and he gets accused of being the leader of the entire rebellion. What a funny coincidence that this person that they keep trying to murder, it's suddenly accused of being the leader of thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And to be clear, if he had been the leader of this rebellion, he would absolutely be cool person doing cool stuff and beyond the show. But uh, the old saying applies here.

We support our prisoners even when they're innocent. And fair was probably innocent, not I. I totally stayed home. What are you talking about? Innocent? He almost certainly threw down. He was like forty nine or fifty the tragic week, he almost certainly was like part of it and probably fighting with violence against the people who are trying to kill him and everyone else, you know. And is his Yeah,

his his trials a sham. It's a military tribunal. They kind of just don't bother entering evidence besides the fact that he's an anarchist, and he and four others get condemned to death. So in October nine, he's fifty years old, they lead him to the trenches outside of Fortress one, where anarchists have been tortured and executed before most week

I did not have pronounced as I didn't write into script. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good place to go of you on holiday that you can find like the routie it's buried there. Oh okay ship so they just this is just keeping Yeah, No, it's a very cool si. Yeah, there's a little memorial and it's like different for that, but for roast it's like this one, like big Headstone just got like yeah, there's lots of cool people in there. Check it out.

When Companch was executed. It's where the Olympics were. Yeah, see the fortress where the commander of the fortress was like killed by his non commissioned officers who then handed all the weapons in the armory too anarchists. Hell yeah yeah yeah, coming back twenty years later. Yeah, and all

the other energies have been tortured there. Yeah. His last words And this might be apocryphal because I cannot quite fathom the source for the last words for the guy that they drag out to a ditch and execute, but his last words were to his fireing squad. Aim Well, my and you are not responsible. I am innocent. Long live the modern school and and you know, and part of the reason I actually do believe him about his

like innocence or whatever. I mean again, like he was probably fighting, but like is that like the more bomber type anarchists who are also have badass last words are like, you know, funk all you someone else will blow you up instead. Yeah, you know, And he's like, no, you're working class people who have been like put in this bad position. You shouldn't be doing this. But whatever, my

will live on. There's a big narrative of like anarchist martyrdom in this time and this movement as well, right, and I think it fits within like the idea of how geographies and saints lives, which is very culturally relevant in that part of the world. That's a good point. I don't want to like, I don't want to like Spain. It's essentially culturally Catholic, and these people he's doing a different version of that, because that's not true. They're doing

something very different, Like that's not what I'm saying. That the idea of having something to say for your last words, because because martyrdom is important and because your ideas will live longer than you will. It doesn't not fit that he would have thought about what to say and then

said it. Yeah, yeah, and I mean honestly, I mean, from from my point of view, like some of the stuff that comes out of being culturally Catholic, if you strip away all the power and all the obedience to the church and ship like yeah, okay, if it means that people are like I want to go down with really cool last words and want to like be brave to the last and ship. Yeah, being prepared to die for your like a thing that you believe it is more important than you is inherent to to this anarchism

as well as as Catholicism. Right. It becomes a big problem in the Civil War because they keep just frankly charging machine. Yeah, yeah, that is that's when the downsides. Yeah, but no respect and overnight he's a martyr, to quote the historian Paul Average. In Europe, in America, even in Asia, hundreds of meetings took place to denounce what was regarded as a monstrous miscarriage of justice. There were demonstrations in London, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Brussels,

Geneva and many other cities. A crowd of fifteen thousand people stormed the Spanish embassy in Paris, while in Milan a group of anarchists ran the black flag from the spire of the Great Cathedral. But the protests were not only by anarchists. They came from all sections of liberal society, and a Brown University sociologist wrote, but Air was a martyr to the principle of education. There have been martyrs to religion and to science, but never before was there

a martyr to education. And it was this execution that spread his ideas outside of radical circles. Finally, you know, no one like he was very him and his work were a big deal within this fairly large movement that he was part of. Right, but this is this is kind of when the rest of the world heard about his ideas was when they killed him. After this, he's he's the front page of the New York Times. Brussels

puts up more than one monument to him. There's like different ones, there's like plaques, there's a statue than the statue I think gets destroyed in World War One and then like gets real rebuilt in the twenties in the in the US your chicken. Em A gold Hen goes coast to coast in the US teaching his ideas in nineteen ten. It's very old chicken. It's actually Emma Goldman. Anyone who okay, anyway, Yeah, people are genuinely confused. That's

why I got banned from discord. Yeah, that's right, exactly, Catholic Church discord in hand. Yeah, well you were on the Catholic Church Discord Server. So it's really that was the main problem. Yeah, it was on the Opus stay so ever again Yeah, I know. Um, and so we've got to stop doing that. And free thinkers in birth control advocates teamed up with anarchists in the U S and they formed the Francisco Fadair Association, which was like

a very CROs class organization. The anarchists were mostly Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The freethinkers were generally a bit older, born in the US and middle class, and they started schools all over the world. People started schools that lasted for decades um. Most lasted about a decade to be real. Only one, the Fedair Center in Stalton, New Jersey, lasted until ninette and his death ended the career of two different prime ministers, which the first one was forced to

resign by international outrage. These are the two ways that anarchist were getting ship done at the time, right one of them was forced by international outrage to resign, So then the next one steps in. So in an anarchist, an anarchist in revenge for far Air just kills him. I think he's like window shopping and the guy just

kills him. And and there's rumors that Farrere's girlfriend, the one who was from earlier or whatever, the teacher, there's rumors that she was involved in the conspiracy for this second one, being like, well, someone's kind of kills someone, and my boyfriend someone's got to stab someone, you know. The New Jersey for Air Center was a cultural center and evening school, and of course it was a day school. Lectures were held for workers. It was basically who's who

have prominent artists, authors, lawyers, philosophers and organizers. If I'm being honest, though, for Air's legacy wasn't really these schools. Most of them didn't last, and that last one wasn't honestly super impressive. I mean whatever, it was better than anything I've ever done, but like it whatever in the US, the Red Scare really fucked the idea of popular education over um, and so the people doing things really explicitly in his name weren't the thing that came of his

life and his work. His his legacy was his impact on pedagogy worldwide and on the ideas of his schools and his work as like one of many many influences on popular education. Because it's not like he didn't coin this, but but he became the symbol around which this this coalesced, and so various free school movements cropped up in his wake,

somewhere directly influenced by him, some less so. Anarchists in France maybe took his ideas the furthest Before World War Two, they set up the Proletarian University, which was crushed during the war. After the war they set up even more schools. They proposed the idea of instead of tracking a country success based on economic development, tracking it by cultural development, which has like had lasting impact on world politics. In Latin America, popular education was taken up more by Marxists

and by future friend of the pod liberation theology. But yeah, but popular education, that struggle continues today. Boys and girls are often educated together. But most of the popular education ideas, remember, remain only a dream except for a handful of lucky students who have no homework and of discipline. We get to have self direction in their education. We learn crafts and sciences both and have a formal and equals, say

in running other schools. So the education that they're they're all working towards, we're still working towards, would be an education that teaches people that they have both individuality and they also have the capacity to organize collectively, and people who are brought up ready to make a better world. That's my my rousing summation that I wrote. Pretty proud of that. Yeah he should be great. Yeah he's a

cool guy. Also opposed to bullfighting. Sometimes his name is raised like inn in like Catalan people have become increasingly opposed to bullfighting spanning Catalonia now uh and like sometimes you'll see him sited as one of the first like anti bullfighting catlans. That's cool? Was he just like that's fucked up? Why would you do that thing? They keep

mowing people down? Or like what's the as I've been mowed down by a bull in my younger years, broken a lot of ribs, kind of like it was all right, yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck it. You shouldn't be mean too animals. I entirely deserved it, Like it was my fault. If you're going to animals, yeah, they should you if you hurt them, yeah, I it all guilt. Yeah, I like I like cows. You shouldn't hurt them if they hurt you. When you're

hurting the mate, your fault. No, I think his his opposition was more on the lines that this is the way that we could inculcate nationalism and it's a weird blood cult, what the fox is happening. It wasn't specifically like this is mean, like because Spain has this whole thing with bulls and national identity, right, like the big Osborne Sherry bulls on hillsides that you see in Spain and stuff. It's a very strange thing. And he was like,

now this is weird. We need to stop. Yeah. All around had some really progressive ideas or ahead of the time in many ways, and Catalan people will know him as Francesca as well that they have perfectly well understood Francisco, which is what most people will say in the rest of the world. And it is on his gravestone. Oh huh. Checked it's with an oh, like the Spanish, not in

the Catalan. I wonder whether I wonder how he would have felt about that, you know, I guess it was it was like it's all nationalists, I guess, so maybe it would have been like same. I don't know. Most of the anarchists at the time spoke in Spanish, not known in Catalan because most of the working class did the same. Yeah, I mean depends where his name was in Esperanto, I guess, yeah, totally. Yeah, it's interesting because it's his grave standards. I'm looking at it is Francisco

Ferrari Guarthia. But then the inscription from the door, it's like it's in Catalan. Oh ship huh. At least I'm looking now, well, I know it's not. No, it's it's in Spanish with the name of the school in Catalan. Okay, well, in honor of Francisco for there. I'm going to now redo reread the entire script in Esperanto. So everyone, um, hold on, glub James, do you ever anything you'd like to plug? I already plugged some stuff last time, so I guess they don't don't funk with bulls. I think

would be my main thing that they will fund you. Yeah, cool, Margaret. Any any final thoughts, anything you want to plug it could happen. Here is a good podcast and you should um and I also have another podcast called Live Like the World Is Dying, which is about doing what it also says on the title it's individual community preparedness podcast. And also you can follow me on Internet if you

really want to. I post pictures of my dog on Instagram at murdert Killjoy, and I get into arguments that I regret on Twitter at Magpie kill Joy and Sophie, why don't you close this out with a joke? Oh man, it's fun to put people on the spot because then no one has one night and night Okay, the only joke is that I don't have one. Okay, Well that's it sad ending. What is that? No, I don't like that. Hold on, let me think. Just tell us about your

plant collection, Sophie. That's a happy We don't. We don't have a lot of time. We don't have enough time for Oh, I have a great plant joke. Actually that what you mentioned my plant I David is Okay, what did the young plant say to the old plant? Ready? Okay, Bloomer, welcome, You're welcome, thank you, thank you whoever posted on the internet, and it's stuck in my brain. Um, it's good. It's a dad joke, but like dad's dad to the also like the victory of punchlines. Okay Bloomer, okay, cool, glad

that we we had this time. Anyways, we'll see you next week, right by everyone. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone and Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. M