The scientific pedagogy in the late XIX century: some reading and writing in the Portuguese debate

Abstract

Through the text presented we intend to outline the debate that ocurred in Portugal in the transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries. At that time, the imperatives of scientific development had reached education as a basis for the national prosperity. It was belived that Portugal had fallen behind in comparison to the other European contries because it was not capable of constructing a civilization directed by scientific criteria, through the expansion and spreading of culture. The debate over the extension of schools to increasingly broader segments of the population acquires a different meaning when the theorists of Education male use of language from several other areas of knowledge in order to create a mosaic of what has become known, since that time, as the Science of Education.