Francisco Ferrer; his life, work and martyrdom, with message written ...

32 Francisco Ferrer^
books, from the founders of the new schools everywhere
springing into existence. Amid the educational darkness
fostered by a bull-fighting, bigoted Government, Ferrer
was a light shining in the darkness, and the darkness
comprehended the necessity of extinguishing the new
light. The bigots failed, and their failure revealed the
sombre blackness of the school problem in Spain when
left for settlement in the hands of a regime controlled by
priests and wire-pulled by reactionaries.
The horrible condition of affairs which Ferrer sought
to remedy, and which called for the installation of happy,
hygienic, and ethical centres of child-culture of the type
of the Escuela Moderna, may be gathered from the terrifying
picture which a Spanish educational organ, Le
Esciicia Espanola, presents of the dilapidated and disgraceful
state of public education in Spain when abandoned
to priestly tutelage. It appears that in July, 1907,
there were in S]:)ain 24,000 defective Governmental
schools, "v/ithout light and without ventilation—dens of
death, ignorance, and bad training." Every year fifty
thousand children die, it is stated, from the diseases contracted
in these non-hygienic schools, and 250,000 grow
up injured in health owing to confinement in these cages.
Besides this, 480,000 boys and girls wander about the
streets without schooling and exposed to habits fatal to
the child's best interests and those of the community.
No less than 30,000 blind, consisting of children and
young people, 37,000 deaf mutes, 67,000 sufferers from
mental diseases, and 45,000 morally deformed either from
physical or psychological causes, are living in the most
absolute state of neglect for want of educational institutions
for their treatment and relief. To worsen all this
there are some 24,000 elementary schoolmasters so
wretchedly ill-paid that in the majority of places their
salaries are inferior to the earnings of an ordinary day
laborer. The number of illiterates in Spain amounts to
ten millions. Fiity thousand of the conscripts who annually
swell the military ranks are unable to read or write.
The contemplation of this picture fixed in Ferrer's mind
the resolve to implant the Escuela Moderna as a challenge
and an example to a supine and superstitious Government.
How well he succeeded we shall presently see.
The Escuela Moderna was started at Barcelona in Mav,