Which ideas on pedagogical modernity were adopted and/or adapted from the international educational debates by the public debate in Portugal? How did they change or remain in relation to political and societal changes? My aim is to provide possible answers to these questions by bringing together internationally circulating discourses on education, such as the ones voiced by Adolphe Ferrière (1879-1960), Édouard Claparède (1873-1940) and John Dewey (1859-1952), and texts produced by intellectuals, pedagogues and legislators in Portugal between 1880 and 1960.
From the intellectual’s debate on the ‘decadent’ state of public instruction and the need of change in the late 1800s, the growing discussions on the purposes of pedagogical modernity and the need of its’ implementation in the first three decades of the 20th century to the State’s appropriation and adaptation of those ideas, aims and practices from the 1930s onwards, I argue that the case of Portugal is particularly interesting to think about schooling and modernity in relation to political and societal continuities and discontinuities because it crosses three different political settings: a Constitutional Monarchy (1821-1910), a Republic (1910-1926) and a Dictatorship (1926-1974).
This paper will constitute part of the background chapter of my upcoming doctoral thesis concerning school journeys’ ideas, enactment and practice in secondary education Portugal, 1890-1960. By presenting the emergence and development of pedagogical modernity’s ideas in Portugal, this paper will help showing how school journeys were displayed over time and discussing how they can be understood in relation to Tyack & Tobin’s concept of grammar of schooling, and to the wider national and international contexts.