Vol. 28 (2024)

For this issue of the Sarmiento magazine, we consider that at this time it might be appropriate to highlight the personal and professional career of some of the people -colleagues and mentors- who were protagonists in first person a new start in the history of Education in Portugal and Spain. We thus give continuity to the work that Julia Varela published in the previous issue of Sarmiento, possibly from the field of sociology of education.

Our place in history is not necessarily that of hero or victim, winner or loser, agent or passive subject-witness.
We exist in history as interdependent, interacting beings, contributing professionally and self-realising as people. Time, context,
sociability and biography are fundamental aspects of these life stories. This brief ego-history of a teaching life that began in
the historical-pedagogical framework existing prior to the Carnation Revolution in 1974 intersects with the vicissitudes and
evolution of democratic education in Portugal.

This article takes readers on a tour of my decades-long devotion as a student, teacher and academic to women’s
history and education. My own research and that of many others in the field highlight the silence that surrounded women in
our student days. Fortunately, today research and publications on women teachers, lecturers, inspectors, writers and students,
and all-women schools and colleges abound and are being taught to new generations. There is no shortage of teachers
involved in this endeavour, teachers who wish to tell the full story, not just men’s story, and who realise that understanding the
past allows us to better understand the present.

This article presents an autobiographical account of the author’s training and experience as a historian of education, including the different places the profession has taken him in his lifetime, roles held, works published and main areas of research. The article also reflects on the evolution of and influences on his epistemic and methodological approach to the discipline, and the dialogue in his historical research and practice with the human and social sciences

This article reconstructs the author’s academic career in the field of History of Education from his training and entry into the profession in the 1960s and 70s up to the present day. The article begins by recalling the author’s early research in the sociology, politics and social history of education, before examining the thematic and paradigmatic diversity, intersectionality and perspectivism of his career as a whole. Finally, the author reflects on his evolution since retiring in 2013, and his recent work on the social history of education.

O Pelouro in Caldelas de Tui (Pontevedra, Galicia) is an educational institution with a uniquely inclusive approach to education. Its commitment to psycho-pedagogical innovation and integration in collaboration with students’ families has proved a success for over forty years. The aim of this article is to analyse and reflect on the school’s innovative approach to education and its differentiated learning processes, which focus on the practical needs of each child and each child as an individual and creator of their own learning process

Sebastián Pena López (Tabeirós, A Estrada 1885-1971) was a seminarian and emigrant in his youth, a cultural and agrarian activist, a devout Catholic and committed republican, and a passionate, late-vocation teacher. He suffered reprisals and repression at the hands of the nationalist rebels during the Spanish Civil War and subsequently fell victim to the sad internal exile of a historical falsehood based on the confusion in popular memory of his surname with that of a murderous nationalist corporal.

Technical training was introduced into the educational landscape of Viana do Castelo in 1888 as an alternative to the academic model practised by the local high school, founded in 1853. This article examines the socio-professional distribution of students’ parents in relation to the educational strategy chosen for each child, including parents with children enrolled in both types of education. The study traces the evolution of parents’ choices over the course of three political regimes based on a series of detailed case studies. The research is based on a problematising comparative analysis of two mostly unpublished documentary sources: the enrolment books for each school, and the electoral register of the town.

While social education is gradually becoming more common in Spanish schools, in Germany it has been part of the education system since the 1960s. The aim of this article is to examine the German experience in this regard in order to learn from their successes as well as their mistakes. The study uses a qualitative content analysis of the literature in this area to trace the historical circumstances that led to the introduction of social education and the main features of the discipline. The article also examines the epistemological origins and evolution of school social work (Schulsozialarbeit). The results indicate a gradual overall increase in the professionalisation of social educators based, in particular, on the quality and effectiveness of their work.

The aim of this article is to explore the history of a small rural community from the perspective of its pedagogical transformation between 1950 and the present. The study focuses on the townland of A Portela on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela, examining the material and immaterial assets of that local community and the phenomena of depopulation and neoruralism. The article presents a study of the pedagogy of A Portela within a historical framework in which people live and learn together in a landscape that has been transformed by the encounter between different cultures, the passage of time, changes brought and wrought by new inhabitants, and the return of young people with family ties. The article shows how these transformations have modified the people’s ways of learning while at the same time preserving local memory.

This work aims to contribute to the understanding of the psycho-pedagogical discourse on pre-school children that circulated in Portugal in the 1940s and 1950s, through the analysis of speeches addressed to mothers, Speeches in two family education magazines - Os nosos Fillos e Saúde e Lar- . Our results show that there is concern about the way in which boys and girls are educated, as well as a belief that education for motherhood would be the solution to problems that mothers were concerned with. In this sense, information on child development is disseminated and mothers are advised on the strategies they could use to know and educate their children, lacking a scientific knowledge about the child and its education, functioning, magazines, as a vehicle for the dissemination of psycho-pedagogical discourse on childhood among Portuguese mothers.

Manuel Panero Martínez was a primary school inspector in the provinces of Zamora, Lugo, A Coruña and Toledo at the end of the nineteenth century. His writings provide valuable testimony on the situation of schools and teachers in Galicia at the time. This article reproduces a report by Panero Martínez on his visits to schools in Lugo, a speech he gave at the Regional Pedagogical Conference held in Pontevedra in 1887, and a report on a disciplinary case against a teacher from A Coruña.

This book is a comprehensive biographical interview followed by biographical notes that Elias himself wrote during his life. This work, however, goes far beyond the training and exercise of the profession, it goes beyond the process that allowed him to become the great sociologist he was. In the two chapters these and other aspects of Elias' work are confronted, but on all these texts we can learn about new facets of 20th century European sociology (...). We are, therefore, faced with a biography which, as the author himself narrates, It is sociologically exemplary and closely linked to an important part of its life and the dramatic conflicts that developed in Europe and in the world during the first half of the twentieth century.

Current research on historical and educational heritage focuses on exploring, understanding and explaining education in the past and its influence on education in the present based on new empirical-ethnographical perspectives opened up by social history and cultural history of education. This approach is promoted by CEMUPE (Salamanca Museum of Education) through its conferences, publications and other actions and resources.

Educación, xénero e lectura (‘Education, gender and reading’) is a catalogue of the temporary exhibition of the same name curated by Rita Gradaílle Pernas and Antón Costa Rico (SEPA-interea research group, University of Santiago de Compostela) at the Museo Pedagóxico de Galicia (MUPEGA) (26 May 2023 – 14 June 2024). The catalogue features images and representations from a gender perspective of the stereotypes, discriminations, struggles and conquests that shaped methods of teaching and learning over the course of nearly two centuries and the role of women in particular in these processes.

The principle of meritocracy, which is present in educational policy approaches, both social democratic and neo-liberal, enjoys the legitimacy granted to it by economic and political powers. However, from a critical look at the reality of social classes and existing inequalities is necessary to verify their truth, their limitations, or how much there is ideological approach. The critical and non-functionalist historical sociology of the last decades of the sixties to the eighties highlighted its ideological approach. Professor Viñao Frago reread these pages and examined the discourse of meritocracy applied to educational policies in Spain, and from his historiographical practice he was attentive to examining the genealogy and social function of these policies, shows the arguments in debate and the ideological resonance of this principle. At the same time, it invites critical examination of historical-educational processes in the light of the best orientations of social history.

Anthology of tributes and personal responses to Justino Magalhães by friends, family and colleagues from different stages of his life and career

Collection of articles and testimonials by colleagues, relatives and former students of the educational historian Justino Magalhães, highlighting the importance of research networks, intellectual inheritance and individual legacy in History of Education. This is the first volume in a new collection devoted to the history of education in Portugal and Brazil.

Antón Costa Rico’s Galician translation of Ernesto Codignola’s Le scuola novo e i loro problemi revives this classic work of pedagogy for a new generation of readers and researchers. Codignola’s text, first published in 1946, revised by Aldo Visalberghi in 1962 and republished again in 1970, will be of great interest to anybody interested in educational renewal and highlights the connections between the New School movements of the twentieth century and recent currents in educational research. Costa Rico’s translation is published by Kalandraka as part of its Biblioteca de Pedagoxía collection

A history in four volumes of education in Portugal over the past hundred years. The collection features contributions by renowned authors on key events in the history of education in Portugal, and highlights the transformation in ways of thinking about and investing in education following the 1974 revolution.

Nick Mead’s latest work examines the way teachers transfer their political, moral and personal values to students. The book focuses on Gramscian-inspired educational projects around the world and challenges the current system of performance-based education and the hegemonic filtering and systematisation of curricular content. Mead’s analysis raises theoretical questions about educational practices in the twenty-first century and concerns regarding the ‘old’ problems re-emerging from the new social, ethical and political demands of consumer society.

Twelve lives of teachers purged by the fascist authorities, these are those who are accepted in this work that closes a trilogy whose thread is the purification of the Spanish magisterium that begins in 1936 with the fascist uprising before the Spanish civil war. The project, by the hand of Professor Narciso de Gabriel, has been growing in recent years to shed light on that process of unfortunate memory.