Can Wars Be a Positive Transformative Event for Education? The Case of the Spanish Civil War

Hector Boado, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (csic)
Dulce Manzano Espinosa, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas

The impact of violent conflict on educational outcomes has traditionally been viewed as overwhelmingly negative, with established literature documenting significant disruptions to schooling due to infrastructure damage, displacement, and shifting family priorities. However, recent studies suggest that conflicts can sometimes lead to positive educational outcomes under certain conditions. This paper examines the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) to explore whether it inadvertently benefited educational attainment. Utilizing a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), we compare educational outcomes for individuals born just before and after the war’s onset. Our analysis, based on retrospective data from the Spanish Socio-Demographic Survey (ES-91), reveals that individuals who began school during the war were significantly more likely to complete both primary and lower secondary education compared to those born in adjacent years. This positive effect was particularly pronounced among children from less educated families and in regions with higher violence levels. These findings suggest that certain wars may convey a certain cultural shifts where more families can value more investing in portable assets such as education, creating unique opportunities for educational engagement, challenging the conventional view of conflict as solely detrimental to human capital development. This research contributes new insights into the complex relationship between conflict and education, highlighting potential areas for future study in similar contexts.

Keywords: Population, Shocks and Pandemics, Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Population and Development, Historical Demography

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