José Castillejo Duarte
(Ciudad Real, 1877 – Londres, 1945)

José Castillejo Duarte was the chief architect and executor of the modernizing project of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios (JAE),
a task in which he was guided by his mentors, Francisco Giner de los Rios and Manuel B. Cossío. Castillejo’s work was probably supervised by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the first president of the Junta, although the latter did not deal in detail with the daily routine of each center of the JAE to the same exhaustive extent as Castillejo. While the exact division of labor between Cajal and Castillejo has not yet been clearly determined, it can be inferred from different published sources and recent investigations that there was an agreement under which Castillejo was responsible for supervising the centers, dealing with politicians and civil servants from the Ministry of Education on a day to day basis (including many ministers of this institution on whom the JAE depended), as well as with the researchers and directors of the centers. Castillejo was the secretary and manager of the JAE and ran the institution thoroughly and efficiently. Cajal was a scientist who rightly fulfilled his duties as president, but mostly worked on his own research. He dealt with the Crown, with the President of the Council of Ministers and with critical issues such as the ominous cloud that hung over the JAE: the threatening situation facing the institution after the coup of Primo de Rivera. Cajal was able to resolve the problem with his firm determination. 

Castillejo’s correspondence and the memoires of the JAE reveal his personality: his austerity and obsession with saving public funds, his tireless activity in the supervision of each and every center and the discretion with which he fulfilled his duties, avoiding taking a protagonist role. Castillejo, following the unwritten rule apparently imposed by Cajal, required the governing body of the Junta to make decisions by consensus and to seek the necessary support of ministers. His job required great skills, subtlety, tact, persuasiveness, an open mind and abundant energy and stubbornness, but above all, clarity of vision and authority. However, in this description one should not ignore his mistakes, such as the very late inclusion of applied investigation into the objectives of the Junta, or the unusual rigidness of the secretary’s actions in the conflict with the Arab scholars Asín y Rivera that resulted in their leaving the JAE in 1916.

Despite these mistakes, Castillejo’s "relentless" activity was crucial for the development of the project. According to Jiménez Fraud, "he maintained direct contact with fellows, teachers, directors and students of the centers, unraveling the many difficulties posed by the novelty of the project, the lack of resources and the insecurity of the future of the reform; he traveled at his own expense, establishing contacts with foreign institutions and individuals; he studied, informed himself, reported to ministers and to the ministry’s technical staff, persuaded politicians of different parties of the quality of the work and their patriotic duty to help; he was busy day and night, winning support and convictions; ‘smoothing things out,’  as he often said with his sarcasm characteristic of La Mancha, making use of wit, eloquence and cunning that facilitated and ultimately delivered brilliant achievements.”

After finishing his studies at the Universidad Central at the very beginning of the century, Castillejo, following Giner’s advise, visited several European countries, including Germany and especially England, where he became familiar with English teaching methods.
The result of these travels was his doctoral dissertation, published much later (1919), entitled " La educación en Inglaterra.”  (“Education in England”) In 1905, he obtained the post of Chair of Roman Law at the University of Seville, after which he moved to Madrid. In 1922, he married Irene Claremont, who wrote a delightful portrayal of her husband ingeniously entitled “I married a stranger.” According to José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, Castillejo was able to "transfigure legal concepts (...) into tangible creatures, living and friendly things.” He went to teach his classes by bicycle and tended the olive grove on the farm where he lived on the outskirts of Madrid, which he had bought after persuading other professors and fellow Junta members to share in the estate (such as Menéndez Pidal, Damaso Alonso, etc.) although Castillejo was ultimately the only one who cared for the orchard. “More than strange," writes Muñoz Rojas, “José was a extremely odd character, with his dry, tall, unforgettable figure, long face, complete lack of pedantry (...) the look in his piercing gray eyes behind his glasses, words sort of sliding out from under his straight moustache, clearly bald, a dry lay monk, (...) the bike as his nag.”

In 1906, Castillejo was appointed attaché to "technical service and foreign relations” in the Ministry of Public Education; he was appointed secretary of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios in 1907, and he served until 1935, when he was appointed managing director of the Fundación Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Ensayos de Reformas.

As Sánchez Ron pointed out, Castillejo was primarily an educator.
His leadership skills served the policies of the JAE and the modernizing project that sought not to instruct, but to train men, citizens, from the perspective of a holistic education. At the end of the period, his critical intuition led him to distance himself not only from policies of the Republic, but also from some of the centers established by the JAE, such as the Instituto Escuela. He subsequently created the Escuela Plurilingüe and then the Escuela Internacional, where elementary and secondary education students were taught in several languages with the goal of training a new generation of multilingual Spaniards educated to live in a world without borders.

In 1936, Castillejo left Spain and worked at the Institute of Education in London. He was the director of the Student Union in Geneva from 1937 to 1939. In 1940, he joined the Department of Spanish at the University of Liverpool, where he remained until his death in 1945. In addition to his dissertation, he published several essays on Roman law and Guerra de ideas en España, a book in which he wrote about his concerns and pedagogical ideas.

After this bitter end in exile, which Castillejo had probably already started internally during the years of the Republic, the secretary of the JAE, despite having always maintained the epicurean motto, “live hidden “, (“ …his force, “ wrote his wife, “lay in his ability to remain invisible”) had the honor of implementing the most ambitious project of Giner and Cossio, fundamental to the modernization of Spain.