After the Franco dictatorship was over, Spanish education entered into
an era of educational reforms that culminated in 1990 with the establishment of a
new legal regulation of the system that has a distinctly social democratic nature.
This situation has encouraged the proliferation of discourses about education,
and especially about its principle actors who identities and functions continue to
be discussed. In this paper we study the contradictory images about the student
(and about childhood in general) that appear in discourses concerning
educational reform. We draw upon data taken from interviews with diverse actors
in the politics of Spanish education that were conducted as part of a research
project supported by the European Commission. This analysis finally extends to
the foreseeable and drastic reorientation of these reforms that is being proposed
at present by the new conservative government with the Law of Educational
Quality.peer-reviewe
