Calle de Rufino Blanco

Calle de Rufino Blanco recalls a village schoolmaster who came to redraw the Spanish school. Rufino Blanco y Sánchez was born in 1861 in Mantiel, a corner of Guadalajara. He earned his teaching qualification in 1883 and later took a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters at the Central University. At the International Pedagogical Congress in Madrid in 1892 he launched an idea that would change the country’s classrooms: Graded Schools, where children advance by level instead of crowding into a single room. The Royal Decree of 1898 made them official. In 1909 the Ministry of Public Instruction charged him with setting up the School of Higher Studies for Teacher Training, where he taught until his retirement in 1931. He wrote a great deal: his Arte de la lectura reached eleven editions, and his Bibliografía pedagógica ran to five volumes. The end came with the war. In October 1936 he was arrested at his home on calle de Viriato; his son Julián, an ABC journalist, insisted on going with him. Both were executed in the University City. In 2020 his diocesan process of beatification was opened.