Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to cool People did cool stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Margaret Kiljoy. The only Margaret Killjoy in the
Speaker 1: world with me today is the one and only James
Speaker 1: Stout sadly not the case. Actually, what there's other? Yeah,
Speaker 1: old old race horse jockey. Oh wait, I thought you
Speaker 1: wanted race. How can there be more than one race horse?
Speaker 1: James Stout? Well, I see, it's in the genes. It's
Speaker 1: it's in the I raced bicycles, whereas he raised both
Speaker 1: just generally underweight dude sitting on things, going fast and
Speaker 1: falling off and breaking themselves. But there are differences with
Speaker 1: the spandex. They're the silk. That's that's how you can
Speaker 1: tell it. Okay, okay, although silk bike Okay anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: well I would ride bike and silk now yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: someone someone send me a cape. I'll do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um look that way you get the wind resistance to
Speaker 1: help keep the whole thing more stable. Yep. And you're
Speaker 1: a badass, James. How are how are you doing well?
Speaker 1: I'm good and it's been ten minutes since our last episode.
Speaker 1: I've been thriving throughout them. Oh excellent. Who who are you? Who?
Speaker 1: That's a good question, isn't it. I am a podcaster,
Speaker 1: part of the team. It could happen here. Cool zone
Speaker 1: media journalist who writes about Nazis and cops and Nazis
Speaker 1: who are cops and conflict. And I'm a historian. I
Speaker 1: have PhD in the history of anti fascist physical culture,
Speaker 1: which is cool. Our producer is the one and only
Speaker 1: Sophie Lichtman, who was also the only Sophie Licterman. I think, so,
Speaker 1: why did you check out the curse word that you
Speaker 1: have in the script? I like that that's true. I'm true.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. In the script it says our producer is
Speaker 1: Sophie fucking Lictorman. And you know, I feel like I
Speaker 1: really defanged you in a way I shouldn't have. She
Speaker 1: had to go through a lot of ship to get
Speaker 1: that added to her government name. I know, I know.
Speaker 1: It's retty fine every time she entity country. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: sometimes you call Sophie just Sophie instead of Sophie fucking Lectman,
Speaker 1: and Sophie gets really upset, like you all just went
Speaker 1: to fairy dies. Yeah, furious. Our audio editor is ian
Speaker 1: legally distinct from the entity that is currently battering the
Speaker 1: west coast of Florida. And it's always funny to make
Speaker 1: fun of people's names because it's something that is always original,
Speaker 1: like before I think before recording I accidentally anyway, and
Speaker 1: our theme music is written by a woman. Today we're
Speaker 1: talking about education. That's where you take podcast hosts and
Speaker 1: you say making fun of people's names isn't as funny
Speaker 1: as you think, and then they learn and then they
Speaker 1: don't do it again. And that's what we all need
Speaker 1: in this world. Education that thing that you added. When
Speaker 1: you advocate for it, you might get murdered by the
Speaker 1: Spanish crown. Last week we talked to Last week we
Speaker 1: talked about Paul Robin and his orphanage and the creepily
Speaker 1: named but actually cool the Hive. And today we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about the modern school, which is kind of
Speaker 1: a meaningless name. Right, Like whenever people are like modern
Speaker 1: and then people are like modern means fifty years ago,
Speaker 1: and you're like, that doesn't make any sense. I don't
Speaker 1: get it anyway. That's the context in which the modern
Speaker 1: school is modern. This is not modern anymore. I'm really
Speaker 1: stretching this out. I forge if I do it long enough,
Speaker 1: Sophie laugh. Okay, it worked, Um, I was telling my
Speaker 1: friend that I was going to write about for Their
Speaker 1: Francisco for the person we're gonna be talking about who
Speaker 1: helped found the modern school, and they summed up like this,
Speaker 1: There once was a guy in Spain named Francisco for Their,
Speaker 1: and he was like, what if we teach kids in
Speaker 1: a reasonable way? So the government shot him and left
Speaker 1: him in a ditch. Yeah, funk, that's Javis jay Z that. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no there's or to it, but they're not fundamentally wrong. No,
Speaker 1: it's pretty much see and the narrative arc that we've
Speaker 1: got for you today, isn't it. Yeah, yeah, with some
Speaker 1: like you know, the whole cool thing about being a
Speaker 1: murdyr as your ideas live longer than you and we're
Speaker 1: all going to die one day anyway, so you know,
Speaker 1: mm hmm. So let's talk about Francisco FIDN. And actually
Speaker 1: I think you know some of the stuff that we're
Speaker 1: gonna get into. I feel like you maybe wrote a
Speaker 1: PhD about in terms of the time period and stuff,
Speaker 1: and so please feel free to well I guess you
Speaker 1: do that anyway, but I'm particularly excited about anything you
Speaker 1: might have to say about early nineteenth century Spain or
Speaker 1: early twentieth century Spain. So Francisco FDN was born on
Speaker 1: January tenth, eighteen fifty nine, on a farm outside Barcelona,
Speaker 1: to devout Catholic parents. Like all of the rest of
Speaker 1: the heroes this week, well, they weren't all born on
Speaker 1: a farm outside of Barcelona. They might have been that,
Speaker 1: but that's not information I have. So Francisco did not
Speaker 1: grow up excited about religion. At the very least. I
Speaker 1: think he had um like some free finger some stuff,
Speaker 1: and his family, like one of his uncles, was a
Speaker 1: free thinker, and at the very least, by the time
Speaker 1: he was twenty four in eighteen eighty four, he was
Speaker 1: a Freemason, which is an incredibly complex topic that I'm
Speaker 1: not going to talk about today, which is when you
Speaker 1: say it now and people are like, oh, some weird person,
Speaker 1: you know, conservative or something, but at the time meant
Speaker 1: often the opposite of that. He was a radical Republican,
Speaker 1: again in the we don't like King's way, and he
Speaker 1: was anti clerical, and not in that he doesn't like
Speaker 1: the D and D class cleric. I don't know his
Speaker 1: thoughts one way or the other about the dungeons and
Speaker 1: dragons class cleric, but instead referring to a society that
Speaker 1: is not run by monolithic church organization called the Church.
Speaker 1: It's important to understand the Catholic Church in Spain during
Speaker 1: this time because it wasn't like like now, like you know, okay,
Speaker 1: actually Catholicism continued continue to do a lot of ship,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's like Catholicism in nine at this
Speaker 1: time period in Spain is not like just the fun
Speaker 1: religion where you drink blood and there's incense and you
Speaker 1: say you're sorry for doing all the sins or whatever.
Speaker 1: The Church was a force of oppression in a country
Speaker 1: that was usually some kind of monor key, and Francisco
Speaker 1: did not like what was happening there. It's my long
Speaker 1: way of yeah, I'm actually curious. I think that's pretty
Speaker 1: the Spanish Church sucked to a degree that is sort
Speaker 1: of hard for us to fathom. Now. I think like
Speaker 1: the Spain, Spain doesn't have like a this argument that
Speaker 1: gets made right. They like, Spain is not a nation.
Speaker 1: People don't conceive of themselves of Spanish and Catholicism takes
Speaker 1: over instead so that their identity is as Catholic and
Speaker 1: that's what Franco manipulates, and it's why there's this debate
Speaker 1: about whether Franco is fascist or not right because he
Speaker 1: has this whole national Catholic thing, whereas it's largely just
Speaker 1: national race in other places. And so, yeah, the Spanish
Speaker 1: Church are a lot of land it is. It goes
Speaker 1: hand in hand with with landlords. It goes hand in
Speaker 1: hand with the violent repression of working class movements, and
Speaker 1: it is hated more than you can perhaps imagine, Like
Speaker 1: if you look at uh, like anti clerical violence and
Speaker 1: violence by the church at the start of the econod
Speaker 1: wor and I'm sure we'll talk about like the tragic
Speaker 1: week today and you will see, like you give anyone
Speaker 1: half a fucking chance and like a mag dick, and
Speaker 1: they will burn the funk out of a church often.
Speaker 1: Actually it's really interesting because sometimes they they object to
Speaker 1: like the institution of the church and that the bad
Speaker 1: ship that it does. Sometimes you will get priests who
Speaker 1: are not total pieces of ship, who are also willing
Speaker 1: to help poor people in their parish right, So sometimes
Speaker 1: they go next door and burn the church instead of
Speaker 1: instead of the church nearest to their house, they burned
Speaker 1: the other church. But yeah, the church, like in when
Speaker 1: you in the July start of the Spanish Civil War
Speaker 1: in Barcelona, like all the bell towers have snipers in them,
Speaker 1: when the when the military does a coup, right, because
Speaker 1: the church goes hand in hand with the people who
Speaker 1: are killing the working class in the street. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: not best friends, church and the people. Yeah, it's someone
Speaker 1: presented it to me and as this idea that like,
Speaker 1: imagine if the Christian nationalists are currently trying to take
Speaker 1: over the United States had already taken over the United States,
Speaker 1: you know, and obviously that's not they're not Catholics, right,
Speaker 1: they often hate Catholics, but that same religious framework, that
Speaker 1: same religious cultural and perical domination, church and state go
Speaker 1: hand in hand, like yeah, and there they notice scent
Speaker 1: could be tolerated. So Francisco for there, he doesn't like
Speaker 1: any of this stuff. And so in his job, he's
Speaker 1: a railroad conductor, which is objectively cool because trains are cool.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you knew this, but trains are cool.
Speaker 1: And he used that position to help exiled revolutionists, which
Speaker 1: is even cooler. There was this radical Republican guy named
Speaker 1: Manuel ruiz Zodiya, who had been prime minister for a
Speaker 1: hot minute about fifteen minutes earlier, and at this point
Speaker 1: was an exile in France, trying to foment revolution in
Speaker 1: Spain so that Spain could be a republican instead of
Speaker 1: a monarchy, which they had later pull off for less
Speaker 1: than two years in eighteen seventies. This is not a
Speaker 1: we're not gonna go two into that, but our man
Speaker 1: Francisco he couriered letters to Zodia and he helps smuggle
Speaker 1: people across the border. And then in eighteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: which is the cool thing to do with the train conductor, right,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, I just I like this idea
Speaker 1: of being like, oh, I'm just the whatever, I'm the
Speaker 1: train guy. In six all the Republicans tried to overthrow
Speaker 1: the monarchy and they failed. They had actually tried two
Speaker 1: years earlier too. There's a lot of various Uh, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of revolutions that Spain tries in all kinds
Speaker 1: of directions. Yeah, and so they failed pretty spectacular in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty six. So Fair and his wife and his
Speaker 1: three daughters they funk off to Paris and self imposed
Speaker 1: exile because they know what's up right, And he spent
Speaker 1: sixteen years in France, and he's working unpaid for most
Speaker 1: of that, for a good chunk of that for Zodia,
Speaker 1: and as a secretary, and he's teaching Spanish as his
Speaker 1: day job. And he's selling wine, not as like a
Speaker 1: wine merchant, but as like a wine in vendor, like
Speaker 1: he's on commission. I think, okay, um, he's just doing
Speaker 1: whatever the funk he can. He's working class guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's involved in everything cool and lefty in Paris
Speaker 1: at the time, including the free thought movement, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, the freethinkers, not quite atheists and like all
Speaker 1: people value In the eighteen nineties France, he was involved
Speaker 1: in the Dreyfist campaign trying to stop anti Semitism in France,
Speaker 1: and then Zodia died and so Francisco in Francisco is like, well,
Speaker 1: well fuck, that was like my things. I was trying
Speaker 1: to help this prime minister guy. It's like Francisco Freday,
Speaker 1: he's like a Bernie guy, right, He's like, I'm going
Speaker 1: to fucking help Bernie if Bernie was trying to overthrow
Speaker 1: the United States America, and well, which he is. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. So we're not supposed to stay that on
Speaker 1: the podcast, right, Um, okay. So so he starts hanging
Speaker 1: out with the anarchists now that Bernie's dead, and he
Speaker 1: starts getting really into pedagogy because he's a teacher. He's
Speaker 1: teaching Spanish for most of his money, and and he's
Speaker 1: interested in how to teach things and how to develop
Speaker 1: freethinking individuals. So soon enough he's corresponding with our guy,
Speaker 1: Paul Robin, the French guy from one of the two
Speaker 1: French guys from the last time the guy ran the orphanage,
Speaker 1: and he starts dreaming of how he's going to found
Speaker 1: a liberal, a libertarian school with boys and girls learning
Speaker 1: in the same classes, with lessons based on science instead
Speaker 1: of the blood drinking cannibal cult. And Spanish folks have
Speaker 1: been trying for years to get some decent education for
Speaker 1: the working class, and he's like, I'm going to be
Speaker 1: part of that dream. You know, he's not the only
Speaker 1: guy who's like, I'm gonna fix the educational system in Spain,
Speaker 1: but he's he's thinking about it all the time. Education
Speaker 1: in Spain in the nineteenth century was sucking awful. Most
Speaker 1: people couldn't read. It was like about two thirds of
Speaker 1: people couldn't read. Most towns didn't have a public school.
Speaker 1: Once again, about two thirds of towns didn't have a
Speaker 1: public school, and most teachers were sworn to uphold Catholic dogma,
Speaker 1: and there would be like diet in this or whatever.
Speaker 1: Like church people would be like walking around being like,
Speaker 1: you better teach the right things, you know, because they
Speaker 1: live in this like fucking weird dystopia that I didn't
Speaker 1: quite realize. Spain was such a fucking weird anyway, And
Speaker 1: people are getting sick of all this ship right, and
Speaker 1: they want change. And so for decades, Republicans and anarchists
Speaker 1: and just not the church people had been starting schools,
Speaker 1: but they kept getting crushed by the state. And so
Speaker 1: for air, he's like, I want to give it a
Speaker 1: shot to write. If only he had some money, and
Speaker 1: he got money in one of the classic ways that
Speaker 1: radicals get money. Have you heard of how he got
Speaker 1: his money. I'm just curious, kind of curious, though I
Speaker 1: don't think I have. No, he's slightly before my time period,
Speaker 1: Like he dies about twenty years before my stuff sted. No,
Speaker 1: that's a good point, okay, Or does he what if
Speaker 1: he's in the blood drinking cult? Okay, so yeah, then
Speaker 1: he comes back to life. Yeah, lady finds him. It's
Speaker 1: the whole thing. Yeah, Easter eggs because of it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're familiar. Yeah. So he's like, I need some money,
Speaker 1: and he's teaching Spanish to all of these people, including
Speaker 1: a like the way that this is written in history,
Speaker 1: um is and whatever. I always think there's something going
Speaker 1: on beyond of the history when people are like and
Speaker 1: then this thing happened that the clearest obvious answers either
Speaker 1: crime and or sex work or some sort of combination
Speaker 1: of the too. Francisco for the is a Spanish teacher,
Speaker 1: and he has a student who is a rich, middle
Speaker 1: aged lady and two quote historian Paul Average, she'd been
Speaker 1: a woman of conventional outlook until Fredair, a persuasive teacher,
Speaker 1: succeeded in converting her to his ideas, and when she died,
Speaker 1: she left him half of her estate. Okay, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: what the contemporary discourse we called a gold digg. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think he gold dig that money up, which is
Speaker 1: a valid way to go and get a million. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: proud of him. Yeah, so he gets his he gets
Speaker 1: his million francs and the nineteen O one he moves
Speaker 1: back to Barcelona. I have literally no, I should have
Speaker 1: looked it up. I'm like Frank's to modern dollars. I
Speaker 1: don't know, gets a bunch of money. Yeah, it takes
Speaker 1: a long time to do those conversions I had. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I always do them when I do like dollar,
Speaker 1: but when I do currencies that don't exist anymore, it's
Speaker 1: really hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's yeah, it's you
Speaker 1: can sometimes find The quickest way I found was to
Speaker 1: find the newspapers from that date, Like if you find
Speaker 1: something in the New York Times archive and then you
Speaker 1: look at the exchange rates that date, and then you
Speaker 1: go that day's dollars to today's dollars. That's how you
Speaker 1: gets give the euro. Yeah, that's how you got the PhD.
Speaker 1: It was yeah, that was it. They were like that
Speaker 1: I had to give someone. Actually I didn't have to
Speaker 1: give him any money. Some money had to move around
Speaker 1: from a donor a donor to an institution that fundamentally sucks. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: M sorry. So In he moves to Barcelona and he's
Speaker 1: going to open a school, and he knows that UM
Speaker 1: wrote memorization isn't the same thing as learning. He wants
Speaker 1: to tear down the division between education and play, which
Speaker 1: is kind of some what you're talking about, like sport
Speaker 1: and play, right, Yeah, And he wants to cultivate physical
Speaker 1: and mental development. He wants to foster self realization. He
Speaker 1: wants that teachers should help students discover things, not convince
Speaker 1: them of things. So he starts to school where he
Speaker 1: wants a school where there's no discipline, no rewards, no
Speaker 1: yelling at kids, no arbitrary rules, no homework, no forced
Speaker 1: working in silence. Uh, no teaching as competition through grades
Speaker 1: and ship. Everyone is only competing against them themselves. Right.
Speaker 1: He's flush with cash, so he starts a school of
Speaker 1: moderna the modern School. It's based on these principles. He
Speaker 1: starts with thirty eight students, but by five years later
Speaker 1: it has a hundred and twenty six students. And the
Speaker 1: stated purpose was to educate the working class in a rational, secular,
Speaker 1: and non coercive setting. And I've read different ideas about
Speaker 1: how this worked in practice. I've read that the tuition
Speaker 1: was based on the parents ability to pay, so it's
Speaker 1: like super sliding scale. But other places I've read have
Speaker 1: claimed that only the leftist middle class was able to
Speaker 1: afford to send their it's there. I don't know further
Speaker 1: in all of those explanations, there's like a clear bias.
Speaker 1: This is one of the things that really annoys me about.
Speaker 1: You know, there's clear biased where they're like it was
Speaker 1: perfect in every way and everyone you know, and you're like,
Speaker 1: was it And then on the other side you have like,
Speaker 1: but it was just some elitea ship and fuck them
Speaker 1: and you know whatever. Um, And both of those histories
Speaker 1: I read that claimed one thing or the other seemed
Speaker 1: really fucking biased. Um. Yeah, these like hag geographies, Yeah,
Speaker 1: totally well fortunately, um, I would never do a hagiography.
Speaker 1: I would never name my podcast of something like cool people.
Speaker 1: And I will just say completely honestly and truthfully that
Speaker 1: Francisco Ferrare not only umu was it sliding scale, but
Speaker 1: it was actually sliding scale. Bout how much money he
Speaker 1: gave to the parents for sending their kids there. Um no, wait, no,
Speaker 1: that makes them buying children, Okay, So students would visit
Speaker 1: um okay, and so like and like field trips were
Speaker 1: a big part of all of this, like popular education
Speaker 1: and like libertarian schooling, and it always gets brought up
Speaker 1: in this way where I'm like, Oh, I think that
Speaker 1: maybe because I grew up with field trips in public
Speaker 1: school here in the United States. Um, it's like one
Speaker 1: of the only things out of all of these things
Speaker 1: that I experienced, right, Um, boys and girls taught in
Speaker 1: the same classroom and field trips. But the way it
Speaker 1: talks about it, I get the feeling that field trips
Speaker 1: were not a big part of nineteenth century public school. No,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I think especially like when you
Speaker 1: look at uh, like the British quote unquote public school,
Speaker 1: which actually meets private school. Yeah, yeah, good stuff. It's
Speaker 1: I think the idea was to like sequest to young
Speaker 1: men away from the corrupting influences of the city have
Speaker 1: been in these kind of semi rural of suburban schools
Speaker 1: where they could just like practice being soldiers. Oh is
Speaker 1: that what I guess because I've always been There's been
Speaker 1: a couple of things that confused me, and one of
Speaker 1: them is the private school means public school and in Britain, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's tod stinguish it from a I think it's to
Speaker 1: from a grammar school, which is actually a school that
Speaker 1: is free, but you have to pass an exam to
Speaker 1: get into it when I think they also perhaps no,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to remember, so, like some schools had like
Speaker 1: classical and modern curriculums, but I think that was within
Speaker 1: public schools. Wait in public school means private Wait, public
Speaker 1: school is a is a specific class of private schools,
Speaker 1: a special kind of elite class of private boarding schools. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we are a country which has really made it as
Speaker 1: hard as possible to understand our ship. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: boarding schools. Like they're they're a kind of wide variety
Speaker 1: of them, or it's not a wide variety of them.
Speaker 1: They're pretty pretty consistently for wealthy people, right, But like
Speaker 1: eaton is the one that, like if you're thinking of one,
Speaker 1: like when all our fucking primate or a decent chunk
Speaker 1: of our prime ministers all went to the same school,
Speaker 1: she's weird. And some people would think that is a problem,
Speaker 1: but not Britain, because we love class and that is
Speaker 1: that eaten? Is that like a thing that is eaten?
Speaker 1: Yet that's where the royal family go, It's where fucking
Speaker 1: prime ministers go. Yeah. Yeah, and not a problematic system
Speaker 1: at all. It's a great one. It doesn't reward privilege.
Speaker 1: It's fine. Yeah, they do have a form of folk
Speaker 1: football that they play there, But I would argue that
Speaker 1: you have removed the folk element from anything more than
Speaker 1: most people earn in a year to go there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's the like, you know, the richer free
Speaker 1: kind of thing. You know, you're like, oh, yeah, you
Speaker 1: get to do all this, Like like there's a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of the stuff that I'm reading about
Speaker 1: about the educational system. There's a lot of private schools
Speaker 1: in the US that do this kind of thing, right,
Speaker 1: and that rules, and I'm glad for that, but I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm bummed that it's not in the public schools, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems to be. I know, when I was like
Speaker 1: applying for teaching jobs, this was a sort of ship.
Speaker 1: I really wanted to do them very I left the
Speaker 1: outdoors and obviously like exercising and ship. And then you
Speaker 1: look at these schools and you're like, it's not the
Speaker 1: kind of thing I want to do, though, because you know,
Speaker 1: we cost so much money, and like you're only getting
Speaker 1: one the people who benefit from perhaps not the people
Speaker 1: who would benefit from most. And it's not a reasonable
Speaker 1: pross section of society. Yeah, it's a shame. I think
Speaker 1: some of them still exist in Barcelona, writes some of
Speaker 1: these more modernist schools. I think. So I'm going to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit at the end about what I've
Speaker 1: learned about what still exists. Um, it's like weird versions
Speaker 1: of different things. But but yeah, so we're not there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So at the modern school, kids get field trips, this
Speaker 1: wild crazy idea where they're like, what if we learned
Speaker 1: things by going to the places where those things are done?
Speaker 1: And so they'll they'll go to like and this is
Speaker 1: such a like workers like nineteenth century or twenties century
Speaker 1: Spain thing. It's like they visit factories and also laboratories
Speaker 1: and museum m and nature and all of that. But
Speaker 1: I just love that they like to go visit factories
Speaker 1: and shipp too. Yeah, and parents were invited to to
Speaker 1: come to lectures at the school because basically, like at
Speaker 1: night and at the in the evenings, parents could come
Speaker 1: and learn about things. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: they could learn about is the products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcast. Really yeah, they there was like a
Speaker 1: weird portal to the future that Francisco Fair developed. Um,
Speaker 1: that's actually One of the things he's less known for
Speaker 1: is the the their paradox that allows educational material to
Speaker 1: come from the future. Unfortunately, he didn't understand the modern
Speaker 1: advertising landscape well enough, and so people have been able
Speaker 1: to game the air paradox algorithm to bring advertising the
Speaker 1: minds of early twentieth century Spanish radicals. That's a great
Speaker 1: consumer base. That's what ranks it truly modern. Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: That is actually where it got the name modern. Is
Speaker 1: it always is attached to whatever is the current real
Speaker 1: time because we live in the real time lane that
Speaker 1: they live in the past, which is fake. Um, much
Speaker 1: like the fake ads and no um, it's true the
Speaker 1: happiness that you gain from these products and services, yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: So go out and consumee. Actually, it's funny, is like,
Speaker 1: when I listened to this podcast, it's mostly adds for
Speaker 1: other podcasts, which is totally chill. Yeah, I mean all
Speaker 1: of us chill. I love everyone who's ever Okay, here's
Speaker 1: some ads, buy some gold, and we are back and
Speaker 1: we're talking about how greatly we personally endorse every single
Speaker 1: advertisement that has ever been put on this show in
Speaker 1: any region. And if you have any problems with anything
Speaker 1: that we have personally selected to put on as advertisers.
Speaker 1: You can direct those questions to me at on Twitter
Speaker 1: at I write, okay, yeah, so this message here there anyway, Uh,
Speaker 1: they have field trips. Oh, and the teachers get to
Speaker 1: or parents get to come and continue do continuing education
Speaker 1: for free. And I don't know. And and the thing
Speaker 1: that once again I like it is this thing that
Speaker 1: comes up at time and time again that the coolest
Speaker 1: ratist ship, like all the coolest ratist groups, basically offer
Speaker 1: culture to people without money. Right. And so he also
Speaker 1: in order to because he's always thinking bigger than just
Speaker 1: like oh, and so just being teacher, he wants to
Speaker 1: develop a new school system, and in order to develop
Speaker 1: a new school system, he also needs all new types
Speaker 1: of stuff. So he needs a school to teach teachers.
Speaker 1: So he starts at a school to teach teachers at
Speaker 1: the modern school. And he also starts a textbook printing press,
Speaker 1: because of course he did. He reached out to scientists
Speaker 1: and writers and shipped all over Europe so that the
Speaker 1: school had all the latest scientific information. They printed like
Speaker 1: forty of these textbooks in the five years of the
Speaker 1: school ran. And and they also published utopian children's books,
Speaker 1: including one that was called The Adventures of No No,
Speaker 1: which was written by an anarchist named Gean Grave. And
Speaker 1: I have no idea if this book was actually good.
Speaker 1: The history book I read was like it was the
Speaker 1: most popular book among this students, but I don't know, maybe, like,
Speaker 1: maybe it was awful. I don't know. This is this
Speaker 1: school I think aired a little bit more on the
Speaker 1: side of like, we are an anarcho syndicalist project who
Speaker 1: will create the working class that will overthrow the bourgeoisie,
Speaker 1: rather than like, I think the school is great, but
Speaker 1: in that spectrum I was talking about earlier, between like
Speaker 1: your soul goal is freethinking individuals versus your like soul
Speaker 1: goal is like making anarchists or whatever, right, right, I
Speaker 1: think this one leaned a little bit more towards the indoctrination.
Speaker 1: But again I don't know, because half the ship that's
Speaker 1: written about this unlike the other ones that are obscure
Speaker 1: enough that the people who wrote about them in a
Speaker 1: modern sense or like these rule all the ones. A
Speaker 1: lot of the people who write about the ship in
Speaker 1: the modern sense are like, we fucking hate these people,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, right, And then it's just a way
Speaker 1: to I have encountered those people in my historical academic Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pair reviews a great system. It does not read force what. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I actually have reproductions of some of those pedagogical texts
Speaker 1: that I was. I wasn't just a really chest slightly yeah, like, um,
Speaker 1: oh cool some of these titles. Yeah. So it's it's
Speaker 1: a series called Texas Decktoria Sport. So it's in Catalan, um,
Speaker 1: and they were made by the Catalan government. But like, um,
Speaker 1: you can kind of see all these reproductions here. These
Speaker 1: were given to me by a friend. I don't know how.
Speaker 1: I don't know how, like how possible it would be
Speaker 1: for people to obtain these, but yeah, it's pretty cool,
Speaker 1: like you can see. Um, like I'm just looking like
Speaker 1: the summary informing of the goals of Physical Culture education, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's like things that are of use for like
Speaker 1: a healthy body, things sort of used for a healthy mind,
Speaker 1: like things that are of use in the workplace. So
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting to see them like categorized physical culture.
Speaker 1: Not until put the ball in the hole, score the point,
Speaker 1: you know, get a brain injury. Um, Like it's it's
Speaker 1: interesting to see them. The characterized physical culture in ways
Speaker 1: to develop a healthy body, mind and you know, a
Speaker 1: fulfilling way to make a living. It's interesting because a
Speaker 1: hundred years later we're sort of back to kind of,
Speaker 1: at least in the United States, just sort of discovering
Speaker 1: that concept again. It's like holistic idea of like actually
Speaker 1: moving your body and things as goals besides just sports.
Speaker 1: And you know, I don't know, um yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know what the case is here. I imagine it's the
Speaker 1: same because capitalism likes to do this. But in Britain, certainly,
Speaker 1: many of our schools have been like they've they've sold
Speaker 1: off like the places that used to be their playing fields. No,
Speaker 1: like kids don't get to play outside, and actually that's
Speaker 1: a very important part of learning how to be part
Speaker 1: of a democratic society. Yeah. No, And and I mean
Speaker 1: more of the like kind of the radical concept of like,
Speaker 1: you know, people should go and exercise and that's like
Speaker 1: part of their like developing a healthy mind. And I
Speaker 1: don't know, I mean it leads down this also this
Speaker 1: rabbit hole of like standing desks are okay, and treadmill
Speaker 1: desks which are okay, but they're also like this thing
Speaker 1: that whatever quite dystopian, isn't it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's see these kids on treadmill desks in the cars room.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like just to get up and move around.
Speaker 1: Like I even I remember when I was doing Pettigo
Speaker 1: G training, you know, ten years ago something that like
Speaker 1: it was still pretty radical to be like fucking get
Speaker 1: out from behind the pantheon where you teach and everyone
Speaker 1: moves around, and you know, even though it's better. One
Speaker 1: of the other things that they taught at this school
Speaker 1: is I think everyone learned Esperanto, which was the leftist
Speaker 1: idea of Hell, yeah, Esperanto is fucking great, and I okay,
Speaker 1: I love this ship off now. It's like, I don't
Speaker 1: I think it's so wonderful, right that there was a
Speaker 1: time when the working class was like, we all need
Speaker 1: to work together to make a language so we can
Speaker 1: all understand each other, and that will help us to
Speaker 1: understand each other better, to have more unity, to ferment
Speaker 1: revolution and build a world where the working class can
Speaker 1: be united and look after itself and we cannot versus
Speaker 1: like this sort of idea of nations and languages and
Speaker 1: monolithic language blocks from one group being pitched against another
Speaker 1: group and I'm not understanding each other because they can't
Speaker 1: talk to each other. And like so at the Popular
Speaker 1: Olympics right in nineteen thirty six, and the last surviving
Speaker 1: Popular Olympian died last year, and he was an esperantist
Speaker 1: his whole life, right, So like, yeah, he's born in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, right, he dies in a lot of shit,
Speaker 1: but like I was, so I tried to correspond with him,
Speaker 1: and the only way can correspond with him with through
Speaker 1: the Esperanto society. And like I'm not an esperantist myself,
Speaker 1: but I was. I met all these people who were,
Speaker 1: and there was so inspirational to me, like the sayda
Speaker 1: that like we're going to talk together, we're going to
Speaker 1: play together, and we're going to change the worlds that
Speaker 1: we all understand each other. It's so cool, Like I
Speaker 1: really love this idea of instead of like you learned
Speaker 1: my language so you can talk to me, and we
Speaker 1: learned this language that we all share and then we
Speaker 1: can all talk to each other. And yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm really sad that obviously. And Esperanto
Speaker 1: is like designed to be very easy to understand, easy
Speaker 1: to learn, right, particularly complex language. But yeah, they had
Speaker 1: Esperanto translators at the at the Popular Olympics, and that
Speaker 1: the idea was that like, if two people didn't have
Speaker 1: a translator who could go between them, that they could
Speaker 1: just use an esperantist as a passed through right totally,
Speaker 1: And and one of the things I I haven't studied
Speaker 1: as much about Esperanto as I would like, And so
Speaker 1: maybe this is a bit my own conjecture of my
Speaker 1: own projecting onto it. But one of the things that
Speaker 1: struck me about at least the people I talked to
Speaker 1: about it, was that it wasn't meant to be everyone's
Speaker 1: only language, or at least a lot of people. It
Speaker 1: wasn't meant to be your only language. You still speak
Speaker 1: whatever language you're from, but then the internation sal communication
Speaker 1: happens in this language that is no one's mother's tongue,
Speaker 1: mother tongue, and so you avoid this like you know
Speaker 1: more and more, like English is the quote universal language
Speaker 1: in a lot of places and a lot of context,
Speaker 1: and and since it's some of ours, like native tongue,
Speaker 1: you get this like fucking problem where you get this
Speaker 1: more you know, cultural colonialism and all this ship. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I find us Bronto. Yeah, Like, I don't
Speaker 1: know whether it's like the thing that I'm trying to be,
Speaker 1: like let's bring back us Toronto, but yeah, but it
Speaker 1: it was really interesting. One of the things that really
Speaker 1: strikes me whenever I read some of this history is
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, the radical left was better at internationalism
Speaker 1: before the fucking Internet. Not because the Internet killed it,
Speaker 1: but just because the way that the movement prioritized communications.
Speaker 1: You would have people like in Brazil commenting on labor
Speaker 1: struggles in Japan, you know, commenting on Portuguese and having
Speaker 1: it have an impact on the decisions that some of
Speaker 1: the Japanese labor struggle people are doing, you know, and like,
Speaker 1: I don't whatever not to get lost in We can
Speaker 1: do it again. We can do it by paying attention
Speaker 1: to each other. So yes, esperanto. Big thing the modern
Speaker 1: school and and the whole modern school was not a
Speaker 1: modest idea. I feel like a lot of the other
Speaker 1: people were like, oh, I'm going to teach some kids,
Speaker 1: and other people might want to do it, but I
Speaker 1: was like, this is the whole thing is couched and
Speaker 1: revolutionary terms. The goal is to develop the kinds of
Speaker 1: people who could make a better society, people who are
Speaker 1: constantly improving themselves. And it was consciously part of the
Speaker 1: larger and archo syndicalist movement, the one that later saw
Speaker 1: millions of workers taking over their factories into a collectivized economy. So,
Speaker 1: you know, in some ways, I'm not saying the modern
Speaker 1: school did that right, but it consciously saw itself as
Speaker 1: we're going to be helping people I don't know become
Speaker 1: the people who can make the world better. The government,
Speaker 1: they weren't really into this. Oh yeah, which, to be fair,
Speaker 1: I guess was mutual. Right. Sometimes I'm like, oh, the
Speaker 1: state's so mean to these people who actively are attempting
Speaker 1: to destroy this. Know, I guess that's fair. Y cops
Speaker 1: raided his house all the time, they followed him around
Speaker 1: all the fucking time, and they also spread rumors about him.
Speaker 1: They were really into spreading rumors that he like gambled
Speaker 1: and had loose morals. Um to be fair, he did
Speaker 1: fuck like a lot. And then but we're just in
Speaker 1: line with his like his his particular moral structure, without
Speaker 1: mean anything wrong with that, right, right, No, totally, And
Speaker 1: within the context of the social movement he was part
Speaker 1: of I'm not aware of people being particularly upset. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll get to one person, but but overall, like no,
Speaker 1: it was like, um yeah, I mean there there were
Speaker 1: arguments within the left and anarchism at that time about
Speaker 1: like the free love and about essentially what you would
Speaker 1: probably call polyamory now and stuff like that. There are
Speaker 1: arguments back and forth. But like, he wasn't breaking his
Speaker 1: own morals. But the government was like, we are going
Speaker 1: to paint this man as horribly as we can, and
Speaker 1: you will soon see why they did all of this work.
Speaker 1: In five someone threw a bomb at the King's carriage.
Speaker 1: It injured seventeen people. Then, in nineteen o six, one
Speaker 1: of the school's textbook printers, who was a twenty year
Speaker 1: old guy named Matteo Morale, he tried to murder the
Speaker 1: King and Queen of Spain on their wedding day. He
Speaker 1: it starts off classy. He put a bomb into the
Speaker 1: into a bouquet of flowers and tried to drop it
Speaker 1: on the wedding procession. It wasn't a good plan. It
Speaker 1: was really actually pretty shitty. He killed twenty four onlookers.
Speaker 1: He injured a hundred and seven people, including all of
Speaker 1: the people who were on the balconies below him, and
Speaker 1: he didn't so much as touch the King and queen.
Speaker 1: Apparently the the queen's wedding dress was covered in the
Speaker 1: blood of the horse, so not well whatever, I think
Speaker 1: my opinion about random bomb means is pbably pretty known
Speaker 1: at this point and mateo, he did this possibly because
Speaker 1: he was love sick. He propositioned one of the women
Speaker 1: at the school, one of the teachers, who was probably
Speaker 1: fucking for their Oh, who's like, and I think she's
Speaker 1: I think like she's way older than this twenty year
Speaker 1: old and she's way younger than for their And she
Speaker 1: said no, and he was like, fuck it, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: try and kill the king. And I don't know if
Speaker 1: this was like to impress this lady or not. Big
Speaker 1: John Henley movie, Yeah, yeah, exactly so John Henkley, he
Speaker 1: takes to the wind and he was spotted at a
Speaker 1: train station. It was as simple as a Spottish trains.
Speaker 1: This is a massive nationwide man hunt to find him,
Speaker 1: and he was like he was in a region where
Speaker 1: he had an accent, and the fact that he had
Speaker 1: like disheveled clothes really like had him stand out or whatever.
Speaker 1: So yet he gets spotted at a train station, they
Speaker 1: come for him, he shoots the cop that's coming for him,
Speaker 1: and then he kills himself, and the cops arrested for
Speaker 1: their for conspiracy, and they held him in prison for
Speaker 1: fucking year before they finally gave up trying to find
Speaker 1: evidence against him because there wasn't any evidence against him.
Speaker 1: And this huge international support campaign came up around around
Speaker 1: this because it was just like, why then are you
Speaker 1: resting this guy? But the cops shut down the Modern
Speaker 1: School like two weeks after they arrested him, and it
Speaker 1: was had only been open for five years. It actually
Speaker 1: never reopens, this this thing that looms large and a
Speaker 1: lot of like popular education, but it only existed for
Speaker 1: five years. And the right wing breeze this a sigh
Speaker 1: of relief because the Modern School fucking terrified them. One
Speaker 1: right wing paper put it like this quote, these crimes
Speaker 1: will continue as long as Spaniards maintain the freedom to read,
Speaker 1: to teach, and to think, from which come all these
Speaker 1: anti social monsters. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we need to put any commentary on that. And
Speaker 1: Spence so so some folks, I don't know, they tried
Speaker 1: to get all the secu so some of the right
Speaker 1: wing people, they tried to get all the secular schools
Speaker 1: shut down as a result as well. They were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's shut down all of the ones that aren't Catholic, right,
Speaker 1: and that didn't pass. Um and historians, both anarchists and
Speaker 1: non anarchists, like to argue about whether or not Francisco
Speaker 1: had actually plotted the attack. I don't think he did personally.
Speaker 1: I think that because all of the evidence that they
Speaker 1: have is all the evidence that wasn't even enough for
Speaker 1: this right wing court to use against him. Right. But
Speaker 1: but this is where we start to get two different
Speaker 1: pictures of who Francisco was. On one side, publicly, at
Speaker 1: this point, he's actually he maintains that he's a pacifist
Speaker 1: and it's not even really an anarchist, even though he's
Speaker 1: like and he's just committed to libertarian education. But the
Speaker 1: reason that I and many historians feel safe continue to
Speaker 1: call an anarchist, even at this point, he's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm not an anarchist anymore, is it. He's like, he's
Speaker 1: not just running this school, but he's like contributing to
Speaker 1: all the anarchist newspapers, and he's like doing all this
Speaker 1: anarchist organizing or explicitly anarchist ory, and he's like a
Speaker 1: big part of the synarcho syndic Actually he's a big
Speaker 1: part of a syndicalist union that includes anarchists and socialists.
Speaker 1: And but he's like, oh no, I'm just a teacher guy.
Speaker 1: That's like his kind of take. And I think it's
Speaker 1: his take because what we'll get to that. And on
Speaker 1: the other side, he was a bloodthirsty, mad bomber who
Speaker 1: just wanted to see the guts of kings painting the
Speaker 1: walls of Madrid. You know, um I, that's not the problem.
Speaker 1: The problem needs to pull by standers, absolutely, way absolutely
Speaker 1: uh not a very the track record of throwing bombs
Speaker 1: at people you don't like it doesn't work for governments
Speaker 1: when they do it in other countries. It doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, Which is an awkward transition into
Speaker 1: our our main sponsor of this show. Um uh the
Speaker 1: circle bomb. Have you ever had a problem that you
Speaker 1: don't know how to? No, No, the bombs. I think
Speaker 1: they're rebranded as obomba sphere. Okay, what about just like
Speaker 1: bouquets of flowers? Without bombs in them. Okay, disappointing, Okay, No, no,
Speaker 1: because like, okay, think about it, because like it's actually
Speaker 1: really nice. Like when my book came out, someone gave
Speaker 1: me a bouquet of flowers and it made me really happy.
Speaker 1: I almost cried and it didn't have a bombinate. And
Speaker 1: think about how much worse that would have been if
Speaker 1: someone was like, congratulations on your book release, and then
Speaker 1: they gave you bouquet flowers and there was a bombinate.
Speaker 1: That'd be bad. It would either way, you're inviting death
Speaker 1: into your home. Yeah, foers, there there is there a
Speaker 1: positive product that you would like to that you would
Speaker 1: like to be the sponsor of this episode A lot
Speaker 1: of time, as we we we previously have been sponsored
Speaker 1: by the concept of potatoes, the concept of clean tap water,
Speaker 1: a always cool pillow, um, a really good comb, smiling children,
Speaker 1: smiling children. I'd like it to be sponsored by like
Speaker 1: the idea of bicycles, because it's great. I feel like
Speaker 1: you're flying while you're still on the ground, and they
Speaker 1: can empower people to travel and see the world and
Speaker 1: meet each other. So yeah, bicycles, I think, alright, no
Speaker 1: particular type of bicycles, Yeah, no, absolutely. Not. Incidentally, bicycles
Speaker 1: in the early twentieth century were used a lot to
Speaker 1: spread socialist Mannichism because he's left wing. Cycling groups would
Speaker 1: travel around rural areas reading prudon and marks through megaphones.
Speaker 1: That's so, that is so weird. You should do it now,
Speaker 1: but don't expect positive results because it will just confuse everyone.
Speaker 1: But the world should be a little word. Yeah, do that.
Speaker 1: And here's some other ads. And we are back and
Speaker 1: we're talking about whether Francisco Frere is a mad bomber
Speaker 1: or a pacifist. And my answer, my guests, is that
Speaker 1: he's somewhere but ween these two. Uh. He absolutely was
Speaker 1: affiliating with the broader anarchist movement, and that included pacifist elements,
Speaker 1: right like Tolstoy, friend of the acts, one of the
Speaker 1: main accidental friends of the pod, someone who just shows
Speaker 1: up in every episode. The three things will show up
Speaker 1: in every episode by accident are Quakers, which aren't in
Speaker 1: this one. I'm sorry, tuberculosis, which is in everyone because
Speaker 1: death weights for all of us, including Flowers and Tolstoy.
Speaker 1: But Tolstoy big part of supporting the libertarian school movement.
Speaker 1: UM he would send all kinds of money and like
Speaker 1: wrote about it, and I think started some of these schools.
Speaker 1: And I kind of want to when I one day
Speaker 1: do a Tolstoy episode, which will I have to include
Speaker 1: also all the terrible things that Tolstoy did. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so he's he's at least friends with some pacifists like Tolstoy,
Speaker 1: but he's also clearly hanging out with the more revolutionary anarchists.
Speaker 1: And this is the this is the fourth attempt by
Speaker 1: the Spanish state to claim he'd plotted an assassination. Even
Speaker 1: he got played for the nineteen of five bombing, the
Speaker 1: nineteen six bombing and to two attacks before then. They
Speaker 1: were like any time any one tried to do something
Speaker 1: in Spain, they were like a Francisco for there is
Speaker 1: behind it. And every time everyone's like, why are you
Speaker 1: saying that? Because he teaches kids, and they're like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: because he tried to kill them, you know, and there's
Speaker 1: like just no fucking evidence. Ever, Um, they really wanted
Speaker 1: him gone, which I think I assume is why he
Speaker 1: was like, I'm not even an anarchist anymore, I'm a pacifist.
Speaker 1: It's because like they kept trying to fucking murder him.
Speaker 1: So he's out of prison. He doesn't have a school anymore.
Speaker 1: He's banned from opening it again, but other people are
Speaker 1: kind of doing that ship now, and Francisco forms the
Speaker 1: straightforwardly named International League for the Rational Education of Children.
Speaker 1: I think this podcast is really actually sponsored by everyone
Speaker 1: on both all sides of things should go back to
Speaker 1: naming their organizations the League of something something m H.
Speaker 1: He travels around Europe. He's talking about all this ship.
Speaker 1: He keeps printing textbooks for all the other libertarian schools
Speaker 1: that are starting to crop up. He starts a newspaper
Speaker 1: to discuss pedagogical ideas to be the equivalent of starting
Speaker 1: like a discord. At this point, I think we should
Speaker 1: be like, one day someone's going to be like, ah, yes,
Speaker 1: James Stout did a lot of work about physical education
Speaker 1: once started a discord. You know, yeah, I am permanently
Speaker 1: banned from discord. Actually yeah, I sent a big video
Speaker 1: of my chickens and it was like you're on something
Speaker 1: really weird, and it banned me. And what was the
Speaker 1: chicken's name? That was Emma Goldham. We also have Wraiths Featherspoon.
Speaker 1: They were just enjoying a mango and of all the
Speaker 1: ship that happens on Discord, I am the one who
Speaker 1: gets ip band it's wild. I understand my bands from
Speaker 1: Twitter for responding to tweets with pictures of Mussolini hanging
Speaker 1: upside down dead like I can see where people might
Speaker 1: get upset by that. I will continue you to do
Speaker 1: it like you can. You can. Don't never take my freedom,
Speaker 1: but I see. And in the last few weeks particularly,
Speaker 1: it's been very hard to restrain myself. But okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: discord not cool with chickens. Why does something happened in
Speaker 1: the past few weeks that's somehow relates to Italy and fascism? Yes,
Speaker 1: quite possibly a girl boss was winning and the Internet
Speaker 1: hates to see a girl boss winning. That's right, Internet
Speaker 1: does a girl boss that And I have positive feelings
Speaker 1: about hierarchy and right wing politicians who use identity in
Speaker 1: order to so um so the league starts, it spreads
Speaker 1: from country to country, and that group we hive, the hive,
Speaker 1: the awkwardly named one maybe the cool name. When someone
Speaker 1: listening this is like, that's the coolest name, and that's fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are pretty cool. Yeah, like they you know, they
Speaker 1: work together, they get stuff downe authoritarian, that's true, but
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, who had okay whatever, like the
Speaker 1: simple okay whatever. There's some joke there that I don't
Speaker 1: know how to make. So the hive joins this league,
Speaker 1: and libertarian education becomes all the rage, and schools are
Speaker 1: cropping up all over the place. And then in nine
Speaker 1: Francisco went back to jail because you see, Spain was
Speaker 1: a colonial power and they've been losing colonies all over
Speaker 1: the place, but they still had Morocco. But in nineteen
Speaker 1: o nine they were losing bad in Morocco. They started
Speaker 1: calling up the reserves to go do a colonialism, and
Speaker 1: James people didn't want to do a colonialism. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: I would like to say it was because they were
Speaker 1: all committed anti racist and anti colonialism. I think that
Speaker 1: was part of it. I think mostly someone said, you there, soul,
Speaker 1: bread winner for your family, we would like you to
Speaker 1: go die in some country for no fucking good reason.
Speaker 1: I don't know, that's my take on it. I'm curious
Speaker 1: if you know this has never happened again in history, fortunately,
Speaker 1: But yeah, well, I mean there is an element that
Speaker 1: is like anarchism anarchism anarcho syndicalism are much much more
Speaker 1: relevant than the like communism in Catlan, labor organizing at
Speaker 1: this time and since this time, until the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: So like, there's an element that I'm sure it's committed
Speaker 1: to anti colonialism that exists within the Catalan left, but
Speaker 1: I think the larger idea being like, I don't want
Speaker 1: to go and die so someone else can make some money.
Speaker 1: I don't want to participate in war, which is scary,
Speaker 1: and you know, there is no veterans pension, there's no
Speaker 1: v a right. You might come back with one less leg,
Speaker 1: but they're not going to help you. And if you're
Speaker 1: going to go and die in Morocco fighting the riff,
Speaker 1: why not die in the street in Barcelona trying to
Speaker 1: stop it? Being the case that the state can force
Speaker 1: you to go to Morocco and fight the riff, which
Speaker 1: which is more or less how it goes down. A
Speaker 1: lot of people made that decision and had that end result.
Speaker 1: Syndicalas called for a general strike on July. The government
Speaker 1: responded in the same way that they've responded to every
Speaker 1: strike so far in this episode and pretty much every
Speaker 1: strike I've covered on the show by firing on people
Speaker 1: for being on strike then declaring martial law. So the
Speaker 1: general strike became an insurrection because they were like, we
Speaker 1: don't actually want martial law. We want to continue to
Speaker 1: have power over our own lives, and they didn't want
Speaker 1: to fucking go invade Morocco. And this gets called the
Speaker 1: Tragic Week. More than a hundred people die at the
Speaker 1: hands of the police, about eight cops get got to
Speaker 1: and as far as I can tell, one of the
Speaker 1: kind of interesting things about it, like the Syndicalus were
Speaker 1: one of the main organizing bodies behind it, but it
Speaker 1: was Republicans and liberals and Cantalan nationalists and socialists and anarchists,
Speaker 1: and it was it was fairly spontaneous, is at least
Speaker 1: the read I've I've gotten, And I'm wondering if that
Speaker 1: maps to here. Yeah, there's always been some links towards
Speaker 1: these people, right, like, and some of these people like
Speaker 1: end up on the on the other side. And when
Speaker 1: we get to the Spanish Civil War, right, but these
Speaker 1: people always had these uneasy alliances, right that, like, especially
Speaker 1: the Catalan nationalists and the anarchists, right, so compounds who's
Speaker 1: the president one of a better term of Catalonia when
Speaker 1: the civil war starts. Had previously been a lawyer for
Speaker 1: anarchists who were facing the same state persecution, right and
Speaker 1: and Catalonia like certainly by the nineteen thirties develops, and
Speaker 1: maybe in part because of the Tragic Week, and because
Speaker 1: as Catalan nationalists, even if they were bourgeois, which they
Speaker 1: mostly were, they were familiar with the concept of being
Speaker 1: ruled by an hoblitary power that you didn't choose, in
Speaker 1: this case Madrid. A lots of them felt that like
Speaker 1: it should be the other They didn't particularly feel that
Speaker 1: there should be self determination for nations. Some did, but
Speaker 1: many of them just felt like it should be the
Speaker 1: other way around, that Barcelona should rule Madrid and not Madrida.
Speaker 1: So they weren't even as they were just supremacists. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Catalonia was much more economically advanced than Madrid at this time, right,
Speaker 1: much more industrialized. Catalonia, the basqu country outstripped, which is
Speaker 1: why you have this working class where you have these unions,
Speaker 1: when you have this organization, right, and many of the
Speaker 1: working class weren't born in Catalonia, didn't speak Catalan. They
Speaker 1: often called them later chapnego is kind of a slurd
Speaker 1: that's used more fiano, like they're like pretending they're from
Speaker 1: mercia Um, part of Spain. Like there you can see
Speaker 1: science in front of these like shanty towns to develop
Speaker 1: around the factory. You can see pictures of them saying
Speaker 1: like Catalon, your ends here, Martha starts here. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: so sometimes they would be complete turned to one another.
Speaker 1: But then yeah, when there comes a chance to take
Speaker 1: a swing at the Spanish state, particularly when the Spanish
Speaker 1: state is in the form of monarchy, there's a whole
Speaker 1: lot of people who are just going to join in
Speaker 1: and be like, yeah, suck it. Oh, put that aside
Speaker 1: for now, let's go. Yeah, it didn't go incredibly well
Speaker 1: in the end. Um. Thus the name Tragic Week, which
Speaker 1: is what I pitched as the name of this podcast,
Speaker 1: is the Tragic Podcast Week podcast. Sophie's um looking confused. No,
Speaker 1: I could be a new weekly show, the Tragic Week
Speaker 1: this week and bad stuff bummer Town. Yeah, what if
Speaker 1: I pivot to something totally What if I start talking
Speaker 1: about bad Okay? Anyway, so people get indicted for this
Speaker 1: rebellion and the anarchists they tried four times previously to
Speaker 1: frame up Francisco Fredair. He's one of them, and he
Speaker 1: gets accused of being the leader of the entire rebellion.
Speaker 1: What a funny coincidence that this person that they keep
Speaker 1: trying to murder, it's suddenly accused of being the leader
Speaker 1: of thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And to
Speaker 1: be clear, if he had been the leader of this rebellion,
Speaker 1: he would absolutely be cool person doing cool stuff and
Speaker 1: beyond the show. But uh, the old saying applies here.
Speaker 1: We support our prisoners even when they're innocent. And fair
Speaker 1: was probably innocent, not I. I totally stayed home. What
Speaker 1: are you talking about? Innocent? He almost certainly threw down.
Speaker 1: He was like forty nine or fifty the tragic week,
Speaker 1: he almost certainly was like part of it and probably
Speaker 1: fighting with violence against the people who are trying to
Speaker 1: kill him and everyone else, you know. And is his Yeah,
Speaker 1: his his trials a sham. It's a military tribunal. They
Speaker 1: kind of just don't bother entering evidence besides the fact
Speaker 1: that he's an anarchist, and he and four others get
Speaker 1: condemned to death. So in October nine, he's fifty years old,
Speaker 1: they lead him to the trenches outside of Fortress one,
Speaker 1: where anarchists have been tortured and executed before most week
Speaker 1: I did not have pronounced as I didn't write into script. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good place to go of you on holiday
Speaker 1: that you can find like the routie it's buried there.
Speaker 1: Oh okay ship so they just this is just keeping Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: it's a very cool si. Yeah, there's a little memorial
Speaker 1: and it's like different for that, but for roast it's
Speaker 1: like this one, like big Headstone just got like yeah,
Speaker 1: there's lots of cool people in there. Check it out.
Speaker 1: When Companch was executed. It's where the Olympics were. Yeah,
Speaker 1: see the fortress where the commander of the fortress was
Speaker 1: like killed by his non commissioned officers who then handed
Speaker 1: all the weapons in the armory too anarchists. Hell yeah
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, coming back twenty years later. Yeah, and all
Speaker 1: the other energies have been tortured there. Yeah. His last
Speaker 1: words And this might be apocryphal because I cannot quite
Speaker 1: fathom the source for the last words for the guy
Speaker 1: that they drag out to a ditch and execute, but
Speaker 1: his last words were to his fireing squad. Aim Well,
Speaker 1: my and you are not responsible. I am innocent. Long
Speaker 1: live the modern school and and you know, and part
Speaker 1: of the reason I actually do believe him about his
Speaker 1: like innocence or whatever. I mean again, like he was
Speaker 1: probably fighting, but like is that like the more bomber
Speaker 1: type anarchists who are also have badass last words are like,
Speaker 1: you know, funk all you someone else will blow you
Speaker 1: up instead. Yeah, you know, And he's like, no, you're
Speaker 1: working class people who have been like put in this
Speaker 1: bad position. You shouldn't be doing this. But whatever, my
Speaker 1: will live on. There's a big narrative of like anarchist
Speaker 1: martyrdom in this time and this movement as well, right,
Speaker 1: and I think it fits within like the idea of
Speaker 1: how geographies and saints lives, which is very culturally relevant
Speaker 1: in that part of the world. That's a good point.
Speaker 1: I don't want to like, I don't want to like Spain.
Speaker 1: It's essentially culturally Catholic, and these people he's doing a
Speaker 1: different version of that, because that's not true. They're doing
Speaker 1: something very different, Like that's not what I'm saying. That
Speaker 1: the idea of having something to say for your last words,
Speaker 1: because because martyrdom is important and because your ideas will
Speaker 1: live longer than you will. It doesn't not fit that
Speaker 1: he would have thought about what to say and then
Speaker 1: said it. Yeah, yeah, and I mean honestly, I mean,
Speaker 1: from from my point of view, like some of the
Speaker 1: stuff that comes out of being culturally Catholic, if you
Speaker 1: strip away all the power and all the obedience to
Speaker 1: the church and ship like yeah, okay, if it means
Speaker 1: that people are like I want to go down with
Speaker 1: really cool last words and want to like be brave
Speaker 1: to the last and ship. Yeah, being prepared to die
Speaker 1: for your like a thing that you believe it is
Speaker 1: more important than you is inherent to to this anarchism
Speaker 1: as well as as Catholicism. Right. It becomes a big
Speaker 1: problem in the Civil War because they keep just frankly
Speaker 1: charging machine. Yeah, yeah, that is that's when the downsides. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but no respect and overnight he's a martyr, to quote
Speaker 1: the historian Paul Average. In Europe, in America, even in Asia,
Speaker 1: hundreds of meetings took place to denounce what was regarded
Speaker 1: as a monstrous miscarriage of justice. There were demonstrations in London, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Brussels,
Speaker 1: Geneva and many other cities. A crowd of fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: people stormed the Spanish embassy in Paris, while in Milan
Speaker 1: a group of anarchists ran the black flag from the
Speaker 1: spire of the Great Cathedral. But the protests were not
Speaker 1: only by anarchists. They came from all sections of liberal society,
Speaker 1: and a Brown University sociologist wrote, but Air was a
Speaker 1: martyr to the principle of education. There have been martyrs
Speaker 1: to religion and to science, but never before was there
Speaker 1: a martyr to education. And it was this execution that
Speaker 1: spread his ideas outside of radical circles. Finally, you know,
Speaker 1: no one like he was very him and his work
Speaker 1: were a big deal within this fairly large movement that
Speaker 1: he was part of. Right, but this is this is
Speaker 1: kind of when the rest of the world heard about
Speaker 1: his ideas was when they killed him. After this, he's
Speaker 1: he's the front page of the New York Times. Brussels
Speaker 1: puts up more than one monument to him. There's like
Speaker 1: different ones, there's like plaques, there's a statue than the
Speaker 1: statue I think gets destroyed in World War One and
Speaker 1: then like gets real rebuilt in the twenties in the
Speaker 1: in the US your chicken. Em A gold Hen goes
Speaker 1: coast to coast in the US teaching his ideas in
Speaker 1: nineteen ten. It's very old chicken. It's actually Emma Goldman.
Speaker 1: Anyone who okay, anyway, Yeah, people are genuinely confused. That's
Speaker 1: why I got banned from discord. Yeah, that's right, exactly,
Speaker 1: Catholic Church discord in hand. Yeah, well you were on
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church Discord Server. So it's really that was
Speaker 1: the main problem. Yeah, it was on the Opus stay
Speaker 1: so ever again Yeah, I know. Um, and so we've
Speaker 1: got to stop doing that. And free thinkers in birth
Speaker 1: control advocates teamed up with anarchists in the U S
Speaker 1: and they formed the Francisco Fadair Association, which was like
Speaker 1: a very CROs class organization. The anarchists were mostly Eastern
Speaker 1: European Jewish immigrants. The freethinkers were generally a bit older,
Speaker 1: born in the US and middle class, and they started
Speaker 1: schools all over the world. People started schools that lasted
Speaker 1: for decades um. Most lasted about a decade to be real.
Speaker 1: Only one, the Fedair Center in Stalton, New Jersey, lasted
Speaker 1: until ninette and his death ended the career of two
Speaker 1: different prime ministers, which the first one was forced to
Speaker 1: resign by international outrage. These are the two ways that
Speaker 1: anarchist were getting ship done at the time, right one
Speaker 1: of them was forced by international outrage to resign, So
Speaker 1: then the next one steps in. So in an anarchist,
Speaker 1: an anarchist in revenge for far Air just kills him.
Speaker 1: I think he's like window shopping and the guy just
Speaker 1: kills him. And and there's rumors that Farrere's girlfriend, the
Speaker 1: one who was from earlier or whatever, the teacher, there's
Speaker 1: rumors that she was involved in the conspiracy for this
Speaker 1: second one, being like, well, someone's kind of kills someone,
Speaker 1: and my boyfriend someone's got to stab someone, you know.
Speaker 1: The New Jersey for Air Center was a cultural center
Speaker 1: and evening school, and of course it was a day school.
Speaker 1: Lectures were held for workers. It was basically who's who
Speaker 1: have prominent artists, authors, lawyers, philosophers and organizers. If I'm
Speaker 1: being honest, though, for Air's legacy wasn't really these schools.
Speaker 1: Most of them didn't last, and that last one wasn't
Speaker 1: honestly super impressive. I mean whatever, it was better than
Speaker 1: anything I've ever done, but like it whatever in the US,
Speaker 1: the Red Scare really fucked the idea of popular education
Speaker 1: over um, and so the people doing things really explicitly
Speaker 1: in his name weren't the thing that came of his
Speaker 1: life and his work. His his legacy was his impact
Speaker 1: on pedagogy worldwide and on the ideas of his schools
Speaker 1: and his work as like one of many many influences
Speaker 1: on popular education. Because it's not like he didn't coin this,
Speaker 1: but but he became the symbol around which this this coalesced,
Speaker 1: and so various free school movements cropped up in his wake,
Speaker 1: somewhere directly influenced by him, some less so. Anarchists in
Speaker 1: France maybe took his ideas the furthest Before World War Two,
Speaker 1: they set up the Proletarian University, which was crushed during
Speaker 1: the war. After the war they set up even more schools.
Speaker 1: They proposed the idea of instead of tracking a country
Speaker 1: success based on economic development, tracking it by cultural development,
Speaker 1: which has like had lasting impact on world politics. In
Speaker 1: Latin America, popular education was taken up more by Marxists
Speaker 1: and by future friend of the pod liberation theology. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but popular education, that struggle continues today. Boys and girls
Speaker 1: are often educated together. But most of the popular education ideas, remember,
Speaker 1: remain only a dream except for a handful of lucky
Speaker 1: students who have no homework and of discipline. We get
Speaker 1: to have self direction in their education. We learn crafts
Speaker 1: and sciences both and have a formal and equals, say
Speaker 1: in running other schools. So the education that they're they're
Speaker 1: all working towards, we're still working towards, would be an
Speaker 1: education that teaches people that they have both individuality and
Speaker 1: they also have the capacity to organize collectively, and people
Speaker 1: who are brought up ready to make a better world.
Speaker 1: That's my my rousing summation that I wrote. Pretty proud
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah he should be great. Yeah he's a
Speaker 1: cool guy. Also opposed to bullfighting. Sometimes his name is
Speaker 1: raised like inn in like Catalan people have become increasingly
Speaker 1: opposed to bullfighting spanning Catalonia now uh and like sometimes
Speaker 1: you'll see him sited as one of the first like
Speaker 1: anti bullfighting catlans. That's cool? Was he just like that's
Speaker 1: fucked up? Why would you do that thing? They keep
Speaker 1: mowing people down? Or like what's the as I've been
Speaker 1: mowed down by a bull in my younger years, broken
Speaker 1: a lot of ribs, kind of like it was all right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck it. You shouldn't be mean too animals. I entirely
Speaker 1: deserved it, Like it was my fault. If you're going
Speaker 1: to animals, yeah, they should you if you hurt them, yeah,
Speaker 1: I it all guilt. Yeah, I like I like cows.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't hurt them if they hurt you. When you're
Speaker 1: hurting the mate, your fault. No, I think his his
Speaker 1: opposition was more on the lines that this is the
Speaker 1: way that we could inculcate nationalism and it's a weird
Speaker 1: blood cult, what the fox is happening. It wasn't specifically
Speaker 1: like this is mean, like because Spain has this whole
Speaker 1: thing with bulls and national identity, right, like the big
Speaker 1: Osborne Sherry bulls on hillsides that you see in Spain
Speaker 1: and stuff. It's a very strange thing. And he was like,
Speaker 1: now this is weird. We need to stop. Yeah. All
Speaker 1: around had some really progressive ideas or ahead of the
Speaker 1: time in many ways, and Catalan people will know him
Speaker 1: as Francesca as well that they have perfectly well understood Francisco,
Speaker 1: which is what most people will say in the rest
Speaker 1: of the world. And it is on his gravestone. Oh huh.
Speaker 1: Checked it's with an oh, like the Spanish, not in
Speaker 1: the Catalan. I wonder whether I wonder how he would
Speaker 1: have felt about that, you know, I guess it was
Speaker 1: it was like it's all nationalists, I guess, so maybe
Speaker 1: it would have been like same. I don't know. Most
Speaker 1: of the anarchists at the time spoke in Spanish, not
Speaker 1: known in Catalan because most of the working class did
Speaker 1: the same. Yeah, I mean depends where his name was
Speaker 1: in Esperanto, I guess, yeah, totally. Yeah, it's interesting because
Speaker 1: it's his grave standards. I'm looking at it is Francisco
Speaker 1: Ferrari Guarthia. But then the inscription from the door, it's
Speaker 1: like it's in Catalan. Oh ship huh. At least I'm
Speaker 1: looking now, well, I know it's not. No, it's it's
Speaker 1: in Spanish with the name of the school in Catalan. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: in honor of Francisco for there. I'm going to now
Speaker 1: redo reread the entire script in Esperanto. So everyone, um,
Speaker 1: hold on, glub James, do you ever anything you'd like
Speaker 1: to plug? I already plugged some stuff last time, so
Speaker 1: I guess they don't don't funk with bulls. I think
Speaker 1: would be my main thing that they will fund you. Yeah, cool, Margaret.
Speaker 1: Any any final thoughts, anything you want to plug it
Speaker 1: could happen. Here is a good podcast and you should
Speaker 1: um and I also have another podcast called Live Like
Speaker 1: the World Is Dying, which is about doing what it
Speaker 1: also says on the title it's individual community preparedness podcast.
Speaker 1: And also you can follow me on Internet if you
Speaker 1: really want to. I post pictures of my dog on
Speaker 1: Instagram at murdert Killjoy, and I get into arguments that
Speaker 1: I regret on Twitter at Magpie kill Joy and Sophie,
Speaker 1: why don't you close this out with a joke? Oh man,
Speaker 1: it's fun to put people on the spot because then
Speaker 1: no one has one night and night Okay, the only
Speaker 1: joke is that I don't have one. Okay, Well that's
Speaker 1: it sad ending. What is that? No, I don't like that.
Speaker 1: Hold on, let me think. Just tell us about your
Speaker 1: plant collection, Sophie. That's a happy We don't. We don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of time. We don't have enough time
Speaker 1: for Oh, I have a great plant joke. Actually that
Speaker 1: what you mentioned my plant I David is Okay, what
Speaker 1: did the young plant say to the old plant? Ready? Okay, Bloomer, welcome,
Speaker 1: You're welcome, thank you, thank you whoever posted on the internet,
Speaker 1: and it's stuck in my brain. Um, it's good. It's
Speaker 1: a dad joke, but like dad's dad to the also
Speaker 1: like the victory of punchlines. Okay Bloomer, okay, cool, glad
Speaker 1: that we we had this time. Anyways, we'll see you
Speaker 1: next week, right by everyone. Cool People Who Did Cool
Speaker 1: Stuff is a production of cool Zone and Media. For
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Speaker 1: zone media dot com, or check us out on the
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