Saberes clásicos y conocimientos útiles en el siglo XVIII. Pedagogía y enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras en España

Abstract

This article underscores the relevance and necessity of a political reading of the Spanish Enlightenment through a field usually addressed only by Philologists. Modern pedagogy arose as part of an overall program of progress and State policy that was hardly compatible with traditional Catholic thinking about the role of knowledge and the institutions through which it should be transmitted. In relation to this theoretical context and the history of language teaching, this article sets out the main lines followed in the teaching of foreign languages during the Enlightenment in Spain and its background linked to grammar, with a view to improving our understanding of the changes and continuities that took place in the methodology and institutional plans during the eighteenth century in Spain.