TEACHING AS AN AGENT OF PEDAGOGICAL INNOVATION

During the three first decades of the 20th century, Spanish schools received the New Education Movement influence, which was a vigorous pedagogic renewal movement that arose as a rejection to "traditional education", characterized for child passiveness and memory-based routine learning. Teachers turned to people who spread innovation. This renewal process has to do with the theoretical education this professionals had -they knew about pedagogic principles, methodology, materials, etc.-, with the opinion teachers had about themselves and with how teaching was conceived in that society. The most important part of the innovation in the period of time analysed in this paper is the ethical one, that means, the conception of education, school and teacher's work together with freedom, universality, lay thought, justice, etc. In this paper it is claimed that the most important fact in teaching transformation was the ethical or moral modernization rather than technical or procedural elements, which are always of minor importance.