The Laboratory of Spain

The Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas was founded 100 years ago during a difficult but promising period and left an unforgettable legacy, even though its existence was abruptly interrupted. As a tribute to this institution, a true
 “lab of Spain” where rationalism and accuracy were the premises, five key “items” have been selected because the Junta focused on them: the atom, the structure of matter; the neuron, the base of the nerve system; language, the glue of the community; and the Guadarrama sierra as the symbol of nature. Along with those four, the child that emerges when education is based on a personal notebook instead of text books, as taught at the Instituto Escuela, where students wrote down their own activities in the classroom and in the countryside. The notebook was the tool to transform the student into a researcher and to make education a shared, experimental and continuous experience, replacing for good the passive pupil and the magisterial teacher.

The notebook became the center point of a quiet, much needed revolution. There were also other technological advances such as the spectroscopic, cell staining, the phonograph, and the camera that significantly contributed to a better understanding of matter, the brain, culture and country.

The Residencia de Estudiantes, one of the centers established by the Junta, would like to remember, with its warmest appreciation, the people and institutions that worked together in an effort to transform Spain into a nation of free and well informed citizens. The JAE was much more than a network of laboratories and educational centers. Its main objective, the core than kept it alive, was to turn Spain into a modern, civilized nation, by building up a culture where excellence and democracy, erudition and avant-garde, public honesty and social commitment came together.