Following the ‘98 crisis’, many regenerators diagnosed that the problem in Spain was the lack of patriotism and the lack of national identity. They also prescribed education as the remedy to this problem. As a result, progressives and conservatives are eager to spread their respective ideas of homeland and nation. Thus, from the point of view of progressive liberalism and conservative traditionalism, this article examines the presence of the idea of homeland and nation in school texts from the point of view of the need to regenerate the country until the beginning of the Civil War in 1936. It analyses the manifestation of a restrictive and chovinist concept of homeland and nation as an organic community – to which the citizens’ model connects – and the emergence of an expansive and cosmopolitan idea of the nation as a civic community, with which the citizen’s ideal is better identified. This duality is visible in school mediation instruments and it is impossible to establish what model of homeland and nation predominated in reality. In the light of these materials, the article concludes that Spanish schoolchildren discovered a particular idea of homeland and nation ignorant of others in their learning texts and reading books, resulting in an erratic and difficult learning of Spain.