La construcción historiográfica de la educación: cultura escolar y el liberalismo en Portugal

Abstract

The historiography of an epistemic object involves: a genealogy/contextualisation; the theoretical and substantive representation; the material proof. In Portugal, after the Absolute State had turned school into a state institution as an educational means for public instruction, the crucial stimulus behind the Liberal Revolution was the institution, nationalisation and official imposition of a school culture. Therefore, understanding and explaining the nature, substance, functioning, representation and appropriation of school culture is to present the historiographical construction of the educational object. In line with these methodological principles, the main object of this study is the education as a product of the school-society relation, in Portugal, in the mid 19th century. The intention is to show that there is a match between schooling and the cultural bases of the nation and that the education translates into school culture. As well as an introduction, the text has three sections aimed at: 1) a historical account that constitutes acknowledgement of a context and an order of the main facts, demarcating and enabling comprehension, in the form of a historical cycle, of the period focussed on; 2) an interpretation, explanation and attribution of meaning and representation and the evolution of the school-society relation; 3) proof and a summary of the appropriation of school education by Portuguese society.