In the text we have mentioned people who were well known in the culture and society of Huesca and Alto Aragón in the first decades of the 20th century. Somewhat older than Ramón Acín, he learned from all of them and was friends with all of them.

Relate them with their appropriate descriptions.

1. Félix Lafuente
2. Luis López Allué
3. Manuel Bescós
4. Ricardo Compairé

• a) Writer of local customs, director of the Diario de Huesca, lawyer
• b) Painter, well known author of Huesca landscapes.
• c) Photographer and documentarian of villages, landscapes and people of Alto Aragon.
• d) Trader and lawyer, real name of writer Silvio Kossti

Solutions: 1-b; 2-a; 3-d; 4-c

Look for these emblematic places in Acín’s life on the map of Huesca:

Casa de la Ena – Fuente de las Pajaritas – Facultad de Educación (where he taught) – Museo de Huesca (where there are works of his).

You can look for some more, if you like, and design a “Ramón Acín route” in the city, with an itinerary that could end at the Pedagogical Museum of Aragon.

Ramón Acín believed in new ideas for a new, freer, more cultured and fairer world, based on a profound humanism. This was the basis of the hard work of pedagogical renewal that he undertook. He wanted a school that would banish “the letter enters with blood” and make room for equality and natural goodness.

He approached learning as discovery and play, based on experimentation, imagination and collaboration. He inherited the postulates of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and of his admired Joaquín Costa, adding to them more advanced ideas of self-management, of autonomous but supportive decisions.

His extensive pedagogical work was not confined to schools. He believed that society would be freer with more culture and with means of survival that would humanise the lives of the working class.  As the Acín Foundation points out, “he did not write treatises or give canonical instructions on the subject. He built a coherent life and practice in all areas. The personal, the pedagogical and the artistic intermingled in his actions, in his works, in his excellent journalistic writings and in his intense anarcho-syndicalist work”.

Select: Exhibitions / Permanent Exhibition. Choose one of its short chapters: can you summarise the main ideas, is anyone named in particular, is there anything that stands out to you, that is relevant to the present day? Share this work in class and discuss it together.

It can be a good preparation for visiting the Pedagogical Museum and getting to know Ramón Acín’s Huesca better.

From his youth, Ramón Acín was close to friends with whom he shared social and political attitudes. All of them were admirers of Joaquín Costa and defended an increasingly radical left-wing republicanism, which led them to come closer, to varying degrees, to Marxism and anarchism. Some became political leaders, others had some success as writers and edited newspapers. All of them will survive the Civil War, but in unenviable conditions (one will be saved from the wall by a miracle, others will die in exile in Paris, Mexico and New York).

He does a little research on the young Acín’s revolutionary companions and relates each of them to their place of birth and to an important element of their biography.

A) Ángel Samblancat        1.- Utebo                       a) Marxist Unification Workers’ Party

B) Felipe Alaiz                       2.- Bonansa                 b) Director of Land and Freedom and Workers’ Solidarity

C) Gil Bel                                3.- Belver de Cinca    c) President of the Barcelona Court of Appeal during the Civil War.

D) Joaquín Maurín              4.- Graus                      d) Novel Down with the bourgeois

Solutions: A-4-c; B-3-b; C-1-d; D-2-a

Ramón Acín had to go into exile after the failure of the Republican uprising in Jaca. Who was this uprising against? Who had previously governed Spain between 1923 and 1929? Who was behind this uprising? What were its immediate consequences? And in the medium term, was the monarchy saved?

Define these concepts: “Marxism”, “anarchism”, “anarcho-syndicalism”. What does the acronym CNT stand for and what ideology does it hold?

Leader of the Huesca CNT, Acín is an anarchist who hates violence (including violence against those who think like him); he is an atheist who questions the abusive power of the Church, but does not criticise the faith of believers and respects their spirituality. His humanism places reason and understanding between different people at the top of his list. He hates sectarianism. Perhaps all this made him more dangerous for the enemies of democracy and the Republic: “the intolerant knew that in pedagogy, in freedom of thought and action, lay their enemy. That is why he was one of the first people killed in Huesca after the fascist uprising of 1936. That is why so many teachers and free intellectuals died. The death of intelligence facilitates slavery”.

As a writer and journalist, Ramón Acín exhibits very personal and direct opinions, without half-measures. His social and political criticism is already very marked in his first known text.

Ramón Acín translated his aesthetic ideas and his way of seeing the world into artistic expression. Endowed with a broad culture, he assimilated the new concepts of the avant-garde in a very personal way. He defies convention and does not renounce the multiple facets and forms of art conceived as manual work: bold typographies, posters, drawing, collage, metal sheet pieces, modelling, fusing, etc. He reveres his masters, respects them, and is a man of art. He reveres his masters, respects the classics, but is not silent in the face of those who are short-sighted. For example, he defended the much criticised rationalist architecture undertaken by Fernando García Mercadal in the Rincón de Goya, in a very strong plea in defence of the new arts.

Visit the website of the Acín Foundation. Choose a work from each of these links: