Justa Freire was born in Zamora in 1896; she belonged, therefore, to that generation of women teachers who began to work in the 1920s and who benefited from the influence of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. Justa arrived in Madrid in 1921, and joined the Cervantes School Group, which was responsible for the education of children from working-class families in Cuatro Caminos. She soon became interested in pedagogy and the ways in which teachers could improve their knowledge and training: after completing her studies with stays abroad, she returned to Madrid, where she was one of the first directors of a centre in which the majority of teachers were boys.
Justa's publications at the time are an invaluable source for understanding how innovative and pioneering the educational system she set up in those years was: children, their curiosity and their needs were at the centre of it for the first time. Linked to this were the Pedagogical Missions, a programme in which various missionaries (artists, writers, teachers, actors...) went for a few days to one of the rural schools in any given locality, where they set up a popular library, performed plays, organised concerts or showed films.
In 1936 Justa interrupted classes at her school and evacuated the children in her care to Valencia: until the end of the war she continued her work as a teacher and inspector. As she became National Delegate for Education, she was arrested and repressed. Initially sentenced to six years in prison, she spent two years in the women's prison of Ventas, where she organised the school for adult prisoners.
Her return to teaching in the post-war period was very hard: she claimed her right to join the teaching corps with full rights, which she was first denied, as were all those who had been purged, and then only partially granted. She was forbidden, for example, to work in Madrid, and her seniority and the rest of the merits she had obtained since she was a young, newly qualified teacher were removed. She continued her work first in Barcelona, and tenacity allowed her to return to Madrid with a place at the British School. She died in 1965, aged 69. She never abandoned her work as a teacher, nor did she stop writing about the profession to which she dedicated her life.
