Corporate History or the Education Business. A Case-Study: Sant Francesc de Sales School, Menorca (1939-1945)

Abstract

Traditionally, the History of Education has come close to the reality of private and religious schools from eminently educational and pedagogical interpretative models. Despite the fact that these institutions perform educational functions, they must not hide their status as companies, which operate in an educational market that requires, for the achievement of business survival and growth, the implementation of different commercial strategies. This research aims to approach one of these strategies. Specifically, it focuses on the analysis of commercial benefits derived from the creation and dissemination of the corporate history of these educational centers. To do so, the historical method has been applied in a case study framed geographically in the School Sant Francesc de Sales (Ciutadella de Menorca, Spain) and temporarily in the years immediately following the Spanish Civil War, known as the Postwar period (1939-1945). The triangulation of written, oral, and iconographic sources has allowed a wide and rigorous analysis of an untreated phenomenon in educational historiography, exposing explanatory models that could reproduce in other cases of a similar nature.