Las escuelas Labaca de A Coruña, un ejemplo de pedagogía manjoniana en un edificio modernista

Abstract

Andrés Manjón was concerned about the education of the most disadvantaged persons. In 1889 he opened schools for the children of Sacromonte (Granada). His model quickly spread to other places in Spain. Many of them were sponsored by private initiative, like the Labaca Schools of A Coruña , funded by Labaca family in the vicinity of the port of A Coruña , to care for the children of working families. The building was designed by Leoncio Bescansa Casares, outstanding architect of A Coruña modernism, and today it is still in use as CEIP Labaca. The aim of this article is to analyse the creation of a Manjonian school in the city of A Coruña in 1915, the peculiarities of its construction, and its maintenance in time as a public school, which constitutes both a testimony of the active school and a model of modernist building of great architectural interest. As sources, we have used primary documentation on the construction of the building, kept at the Municipal Archive of A Coruña , and registration documents and visiting books, guarded in the secretariat of the centre itself; press of the time, which give account about the school; and bibliography on the Manjonian pedagogy and the city of A Coruña in the first third of twentieth century.