Margarita Comas Camps

Menorca, 1892 – Devon, UK, 1972

Margarita Comas Camps was a great educator. She was awarded a scholarship by the Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios to come to England, the country which she found herself in when the Civil War broke out and where she lived in exile, defending coeducation and the need for scientific education from childhood. She took care of the Basque children evacuated to England in 1937. She worked as a teacher at the emblematic Dartington Hall, in the county of Devon. She returned to Menorca with her husband, the photographer and painter Guillem Bestard, during the final years of Francoism. She maintained her residence in the south-west of England, where she died.

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School should resemble the family as much as possible.
Comas Camps defended co-education as a pilar of modernity. If the presence of women in public life is on the rise and men and women share social and workspaces, schools too must facilitate coexistence and enforce gender equality. It is through psychoanalysis, the most modern of all the sciences, that we can and must understand the convenience of schools that, like family, educate the men and women of the future by keeping them in continual coexistence with one another.
Every girl who believes in equal opportunities for the sexes has also learnt the value of cooperation.
The objective of education has to be the discovery of vocation, along with its empowerment. Together, in schools where science and humanities coexist, boys will learn that the links between masculinity and domination can be broken whilst girls will learn that sensitivity is not a feminine virtue. Comas does not believe in gender essentialism. Comas does not believe in gender essentialism. She believes that human beings, like plants, grow if they receive the correct nourishment and light.
We do not want young minds to be well furnished, but well built, in order to develop not a merely masculine civilization, but a coeducated one.
Margarita Comas is aware that progress is not linear. Both steps forward and steps back are inherent to modernity. She hopes that In the world of teaching, which interested her greatly, the backward steps are always minimal and do not prevent science and humanities from coexisting in schools; nor boys and girls from sharing the classroom space equally. Finally, learning is a continuous, vital duty. It is not exclusive to our childhood and youth. It must accompany us always.

ACTRESS: Maite Jáuregui | SOURCE: Escritos sobre ciencia, género y educación. Ed. by J.M. Bernal Martínez y F. Comas Rubí y El método Mackinder | DIRECCIÓN Y GUIÓN: Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles | PRODUCCIÓN: Isabel Santafé, Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles | CASTING: Cervantes Theatre | DISEÑO ARTÍSTICO: Lucy Richards | VESTUARIO: O.La.La Vintage Wardrobe | MAQUILLAJE Y PELUQUERÍA: Charo Hairdressing | POSTPRODUCCIÓN: Luke Hagan, Jonas Hawkins | SONIDO: Luke Robinson | REGIDOR DE PLATÓ: Jacob Saul | CÁMARA: Luke Hagan, Samuel Walker | MONTAJE: Ashley Thorpe | FOTOFIJA: Vanessa Miles | TRADUCCIÓN: Hannah Cole | VOZ ARROZ CON LECHE: Lisa Campos Sánchez.