WRITING AND INSTITUTION: REPRESENTATION OF EDUCATION

Writing and institution are representations of education. Institutional education, represented through educational schooling, incorporates tradition and orality and may be transmitted through gesture, the body and symbolism. Educational schooling is a historical construction. As the nucleus of modern institution-education, constitutive of the dialectic between education and writing, educational schooling has been documented in written, archival and museological sources and in a variety of memories, traditions and symbologies.

The educational institution has gained a basic, cultural, methodical, formative and organisational structure through writing and pedagogy. This structure, crucial to the individual and society, has provided support to memory, regulation, dissemination, transmission, permanence, reproduction, replication and creativity. The modern school institution represented and became central to the institution-education. The writing of the school institution evolved and incorporated different discursive configurations, including lexical, semantic and textual variations. The outcome of literate and lettered profiles also constituted a curricular and organisational representation of the school institution, where it became possible to distinguish lettered, humanistic, technical and professional profiles in the transition from the first Modernity.

The school institution became associated with educational, pedagogical and didactic dimensions. In the evolution of institutional schooling, transformations have occurred in the material, socio-cultural, gestural, organisational and recording components.

Education, as a field of information and the constitution of the social and human, benefited from a remarkable expansion and evolution in the transition from the medieval. The Renaissance was largely concerned with the reconfiguration and pedagogy of the educational. Scholasticism, the term that properly translates the constitution and status of universities in medieval Christianity, brought formalism to education: a space and establishment; a curricular plan and progression by subjects; application of the writing element in the transmission, acquisition and approval of pupils. Written formalisation made the recording of contents, curricular progression and the organisation of the learning collective possible. The mechanisation of typography also contributed to a multiplication of school materials.

By incorporating the formal and didactic in the medieval transition, Scholasticism gave birth to a regulating pedagogical model, driven by guidelines, methods, ways of organising and assessing teaching, which were pursued in the Renaissance. Writing is what established educational schooling. It enabled the configuration of a pedagogical framework, the ordering of spaces, the hierarchy of duties and, at a didactic level, made textual preservation, maintenance and creation possible.

Essentially, the institutional writing of modern education was pedagogical writing. The Ratio Studiorum of the Society of Jesus was a strict model and its influence was prolonged over time as it served to introduce institutional schooling into study plans, method and in the reference to agents, contents, pace and ways of functioning. Educational writing challenged the imagination, ideation and projection. These features were part of the institution-education, however, by rule they were not a part of pedagogical writing.

Historically, the educational institution gave substance and meaning to educational schooling. The school was the main structure behind the rationality, organisation and development of the modern education-institution. Neither school nor educational schooling may be considered in the absence of writing.

In the long term, representation of the education-institution through the school corresponds to a sequence of historical and pedagogical frameworks which present an ideological, social, cultural and pedagogic idiosyncrasy. Historical reconstitution relies on written documentation which has varied according to the reality, forms of production, representation and addressees. In curricular, organisational, pedagogic, didactic, socio-anthropological terms, writing has provided a rationale and record. At a rational level, writing has assured projection, preservation and transformation; as a record, it has established the educational as the representation and means of institutional, ideological and axiological action, and also of prudence and the transformation of values, thinking and practices.

The universe of education-related archival and printed writing presents distinct types: educational, pedagogic, didactic. It also makes it possible to reconfigure the educational as an epistemic, conceptual, organisational and praxeological field. At an intrinsic level, teaching, learning and the use of writing have determined profiles, curricula, policies, methods, means and teaching and training programmes. Writing is the representation of educability and is also the condition of education science. The theory, praxeology and conceptualisation of education fall under the scope of education science. The constellation of education sciences has evolved on the basis of the epistemic perspective, the cartography of the educational field, the (in)formative component and the type of writing.

As a symbology, an archive and analytical strand, educational writing is made up of writings that reflect the degree of educability, the theme, the discursive genre which vary in their form of presentation and recording, according to the addressee and the aims. Taking into account the formula and form of register, it is possible to divide into one group taxonomies, systematics, cartographies, rationalities and praxeologies; in the other, the utopic, essayistic, descriptive, argumentative, justificative and illustrative discourses.

TOWARDS AN INSTITUTIONALIST APPROACH

The idea of institution fostered by Quintilian, in Institutio Oratoria, and by Michel de Montaigne, in De l’Institutio des Enfants, was associated with education. Dermeval Saviani points out that the concept of institution is vested with the “common idea of something that was not given and is created, placed, organised and constituted by man” (Saviani, 2007, p. 4). The institution is associated with thepermanent satisfaction of needs. As education, the institution congregates “in a single manner” (Saviani, 2007, p. 4), interpretations of planning, instruction, teaching, training, method and system. Saviani reiterates that overall, “the creation process of institutions coincides with that of institutionalising activities that were formerly performed in an un-institutionalised, asystematic, informal and spontaneous manner” (Saviani, 2007, p. 5).

Quintilian had incorporated the doctrine on rhetoric into the institution, as a means of formalising the way of representing and saying. By resuming and undertaking education, the primary activity, the school consigned the institutional nature and developed a form of writing. As the concept of institution is intrinsic to education, schooling embodies discipline, quality of knowledge and speech, creation and transformation. The school would not exist if it were not for the institution and writing. The educational institution, which began with Quintilian and was pursued by Montaigne, saw an evolution in its meaning, way of representing, pedagogical plans, subjects and organisation. Therefore, the educational institution was converted into the school-institution, encompassing ideology, materiality, organisation and power, action, permanence and change. The school institution is a totality. Its materiality and identity have concerns and decisions of a curricular, material and formative nature, attaining educational singularities. The schools-institution were characterized and transformed according to the formative model, the types of public and the pedagogic-didactic relationship.

Associated with education, the idea of institution has preserved the marks of edification and longevity. There are reminiscences of the educational institution which refer to a humanitarian and civilisational “timelessness”, however, in the medieval transition, while the evolution of a free society to a regulated and recorded society was in progress, educational schooling emerged as a lettered representation and cultural mediation.

Between the end of the Middle Ages and the second half of the nineteenth century, the institution-education was at the centre of the cultural, scientific and political movements. The Renaissance, Humanism, Classicism, Rationalism, the Enlightenment were movements of culture, science, ideology, social organisation and power, which impacted education and took institutional schooling as a representation, means and process. Modern education was established as modernisation, the goal and fulfilment of man; memory and transformation of the natural; condition and process of the social, organisational, cultural and political. The institution-education evolved to the education-school and to the school-institution.

A number of different theories have been constructed around the history of western schooling, which, in broad terms, covers the above-mentioned genealogy. Assumedly genealogical, the institutionalist theory has benefited from an in-depth analysis and expansion, but has also been subject to contestation, regarding certain circumstances and features. Another theory, whose axiological, cultural, curricular and gestural substrata rooted in the transmission and appropriation of the princely and aristocratic matrix of civilisation and western education, became associated with the studies of Norbert Elias (1991) and Max Weber (1966). More recently, this theory was re-elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu (2001, pp. 155-198).

This last theory is closer to the type of schooling referred to as the civilizing process, and takes education as the centre of modernisation, as a descending socio-cultural transmission. The organising principle is that through imitation, popularisation and participation, the cultural and educational legacy shifted from the elite and lettered and ennobled sectors to other segments of society, thus enhancing their approximation through the ascension of the latter. In the process involving acculturation, social and civil approximation and the raising of morals, written culture and the school establishment were decisive.

In western modernisation, emphasis is placed on connections and continuities between socio-cultural transmission and bureaucracy associated with record-keeping at an organisational level, which are an educational legacy transmitted and inherited in the form of symbolic capital. Norbert Elias draws attention to the fact that historical and social structures should be regarded as products of an evolution, and that the personality formation of the human being is dependent on historical changes, social norms and the structure of human relations.^[2] Taking a closer look at the recent past, Norbert Elias concludes that the educational institution was the generator of a “social habitus”. Therefore, education influenced the image of the self and the state teaching establishments were, excessively, geared “towards deepening and enhancing the sense of ‘us’, exclusively focused on national tradition” (Elias, 1991, p. 273).^[3]

The opportunity for success and individual conscience are related to the surrounding environment, historical circumstances and education. In this sense, Norbert Elias concludes that “the humanists were among the first human groups whose personal accomplishments and characteristics guaranteed the possibility of access to prestigious social positions in the administration of the state or the city” (Elias, 1991, p. 257). Although more in-depth analyses on school action are necessary, the educational institution affected individuals and gave rise to a “social habitus”, which, in certain historical circumstances, corresponded to a national conscience.

Another theory associates the birth of the modern school to the random and contingent combination of two knowledge-power rationales: that of the organisation operated by the bureaucratic and ascending authority of the Modern State; the other of the pastoral, missionary and evangelisation. This theory was documented by Ian Hunter, in Rethinking the School. Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (1994), by the term “social governance”, with regard to the first of the two rationales, and the term “spiritual guidance”, to the second. The construction-assertion of the Modern State and the institutionalized movements of, on the one hand, the Lutheran and Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Reformation on the other (all associated with acculturation, conversion and evangelisation movements), set in motion the vernacular, schooling and censorship and policing processes, which extended the combination of those two rationales up to the eighteenth century, both in Europe and further afield. Marcelo Caruso does not contest this theory, however he presented a critical analysis of the chronology and grounds defended by Ian Hunter, with a contrasting, broader and more sovereign perspective of schooling, namely in relation to the conditioning of the status of the school and universities at the end of the Middle Ages. He went on to document school diversity and to emphasise the autonomy of universities in the late medieval Italian republics. He also highlighted the status of municipal schools in the German principalities, under the Lutheran Reformation (Caruso, 2014, pp. 87-109). Marcelo Caruso concludes that schooling was not only dependent on advances, retreats and conversion and evangelisation conflicts: the pastoral and bureaucratic theory also took shape and gained meaning in the reaction to the decline of urban utilitarianism. Modern school was not one-dimensional: it embodied diversities and presented a complex nature.

The school institution was a reflection of cultural, economic, social and political evolution, but was also a construction and an agent. School institutionalisation was the reification of interactionism. Without opposing the above-mentioned theories with a historical syncretism, which would not be in any way clarifying, it is possible to bring the strong points of the school institutionalisation together and centre the main key ideas around the interaction between the school and modern society. In this regard, one may pick up on the study of André Petitat, Production de l’École — Production de la Société (Analyse Socio-historique de quelques Moments Décisifs de l’Évolution Scolaire en Occident) (1982), in which a role is attributed to the school in the production-reproduction of society.

The school, as an institution, was the focus of the long, argued essay in L’École entre institution et pédagogie. Repenser la Rèforme, by psycholinguist and pedagogue David Olson (2005). This author justifies the need and importance of approaching the school as an institution, since the school assumes education as an autonomous and bureaucratic structure, based on a collective rationale. It is quintessentially a political and social institution, and so schooling needs to be analysed from an institutional perspective. Within the school, the institutional and pedagogical establish a dialogue. School innovation and transformation are rooted in the pedagogical as an institutional practice.

Resuming the complex of schooling, modernisation and globalisation, since the 1990s, the neo-institutionalist perspective has begun to gain force. This approach retrieves, founds and updates the schooling-modernisation relationship, picking up on the historic argument and showing, through documents and statistics, that the standardisation and globalisation of the school model throughout the twentieth century were intrinsically related to the development and convergence of economic and cultural globalisation. John Meyer (2000) systematised this convergence, frequently characterised as an isomorphic process, as an approximation of these three dimensions: access/mandatory schooling; curricula; structures and organisational field.

At a historical level, the convergence arises from the isomorphism between internationalisation and the constitution of national education systems. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, at the origin and evolution of the national education systems, the congruency obtained by modelling and regulation, among the curricular dimension, organisational field and methodology has been enhanced.

In Tecendo Nexos. História das Instituições Educativas [Weaving Links. The History of Educational Institutions] and, more recently, in Da Cadeira ao Banco. Escola e Modernização (séculos XVIII-XX) [From the Chair to the Bench. The School and Modernization (XVIII-XX centuries)], I systematised the main dimensions of institutional schooling and then went on to present and characterise the historical and pedagogical cycles of schooling in the western world: state intervention, nationalisation, governmentalization, regimentation, globalisation and diversification (Magalhães, 2004, 2010). A structure underlies institutionalisation which is composed of: materiality (time, space, organisation); epistemic rationale (scientific, cultural, technical); curriculum (study plan, way of teaching, method); audience (access, recruitment and ways of educating and leaving); status and value of schooling; educational and pedagogical ideology; educational and school memory.

The educational institution is a material, organisational and establishing institution. The totality-institutionalisation interaction configures each school as an institutional singularity, whether as an organisation or as an institution-school. The educational institutions correspond to totalities that represent and unfold through the educational field, joining the educational, pedagogical and didactic. The educational institute is cumulative in time, space, in the organisational and communicational structure, in demonstrations of sociability, in forms of interaction, in the pedagogical and curricular ideology, in materiality, in the collective and individual appropriation, and in local identity and memory.

EDUCATION-INSTITUTION. RENAISSANCE, HUMANISM, REFORMATION

Louis Marin infers that education, in a general sense, is “instrumental mediation in a society and specific era between a body of knowledge and a system of values on the one hand, and a mass of individuals entering this same society on the other” (Marin, 1975, p. 206). It is about individuals with a concrete existence, endowed with requirements, needs, tendencies, expectations and potentialities. Educability and historicity are part of the same complex, bringing together the institutional and ephemeral, fulfilling different temporalities.

The institutionalisation theory is rooted in the schooling of instruction and education; in the cursiveness of education-training; in literate acculturation; in literary, scientific and technical training, internal to the literacy and lettered culture processes; in the refinement of the human being; in the reinvention of the social. The institutionalisation of schooling converted the human being into the centre of formal education. Throughout the first and second Modernity, institutional schooling became associated with civil formalisation, citizenship, participation in the consumption and fruition of collective well-being and political democratisation. This institutional complex was referred to by Theodore Marshall in the following terms: “There is, I propose, an affinity between the sequence of institutional structures and the expansion of citizenship rights, and the two are linked through the pedagogical reach of ideas about educability” (Marshall, 1964, p. 32).

School institutionalisation dates back to the transition from the medieval and has evolved in terms of uniformity and globalisation. However, since the late 1970s, it has been threatened by cleavage, as the uniformity of the pedagogical model and institutional nucleus have proven to resist adaptation to cultural and educational diversity. The educational institution has brought together the principles of good manners, values, virtues, civility, with a rationale and symbolic, organisational and methodical transmission and acquisition structure. Correlatively, a materiality, organisation and bureaucracy have been implemented. In short, the history of school institutionalisation reflects an evolution from the education-school to the school-institution, mediated by the dialectic between the crystallisation and innovation of institutional schooling.

Émile Durkheim, main galvanizer of the institutionalist theory, related the historical constitution of educational schooling to the transition from the scholastic and the formation of universities—an evolution that is thought to have occurred between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The school language was Latin. The study plan was organised by subjects. The dialectic subject conferred a logical culture to the spirit, while the teaching of grammar favoured the formalisation and organisation of learning collectives. During the medieval transition, schooling of the educational institution was assured by the subjects contained in the trivium and quadrivium. When the universities were formed, these subjects were re-ordered and broadened, according to the lettered profiles, particularly for the theologists, canonists, jurists and doctors. Cultivation of the bonae litterae was conducted through trilingual teaching (Greek, Latin, Hebrew), and the recovery of good texts, as a source of virtue and knowledge (Durkheim, 1969).

Education as a theocracy, humanitas, civitas brought substance and meaning to the school institution. Institutional schooling was part of the Renaissance and Reformation, both Protestant and Catholic. The humanists paved the way for the temporal and urbanity, dimensions that were highlighted by the contributions of Luther, Melanchton, Calvin and Erasmus.

Luther, who led a public demonstration against the dogmas and practices of the Roman orthodoxy, wrote about education and schooling; he wrote a newsletter on Christian education to the reformist Presbyterians; he was responsible for the school reform in his birthplace. Melanchton and Calvin created a school curriculum based on the profile of the believers and Presbyterians who were to be educated. In Praise of Folly (1951) published in 1511, Erasmus criticised the society and education of his time. In the same sense, and based on classical culture, Erasmus organised an encyclopaedia formed by short sentences and thoughts (Adagia) that illustrated the field of education. The first publication of Adágios is dated 1500. In Colloquies (1875), designed to be read by scholars (scholarly dialogues), Erasmus gave value to the teaching of literature and cultivated themes and characters that corresponded to lettered profiles, that updated classical humanism to which they conferred a secular dimension. He also sustained that the rhetoric and teaching of languages was the basis of knowledge and that literature was a manifestation of the human sublimity. In The Civility of Children (1978), designed for children and adults, Erasmus of Rotterdam fostered a secular dimension to education and developed a civil and humanistic argument in defence of the school. He attributed a utilitarian function to primary school, debasing the teaching and practice of the vernacular as knowledge and communication, and as a means of civil and professional education of the new urban and bourgeois communities in the mobility process. These communities were able to acquire rules and forms of behaviour, up to then reserved to the aristocracy and transmitted by blood or tradition, through civil catechism (formed by a sequence of questions and answers on civility, good manners and pragmatics) in public and private locations.

Utopia, by Thomas Morus, published in 1516, developed a prose poem of an imagined republic that recreated the most virtuous of what had been cultivated by Classical Antiquity. In the republic of the Utopians, the updating and recreation of the classical legacy corresponded to the Renaissance. On a visit to Thomas Morus, Erasmus took him the first edition of Adagia and Colloquies; in return, he took the manuscript of Utopia that came to be published in Basel (1516). Education was a central feature of Utopia. It included good manners, virtues, lifestyles and philosophies, in addition to lettered and professional education. It may be said that the Utopia of Thomas Morus offers a positive reflection on the critical aspects of education and society that were criticised by Erasmus in Praise of Folly.

The cultivation of good manners and virtue had been a prerogative of the classical languages. The Renaissance corresponded to a cultural updating and dissemination of the classical in the Latin and Greek languages. Vernacular versions were also created or adapted. The mechanisation of typography was also linked to the school process. Recourse to the vernacular and the introduction of customs connected to urbanism, trade economy and written administration made education accessible to and useful for the less distinguished social classes. School civility was a means for acculturation and social and cultural uniformisation. With an identical function, geared towards the temporal and civil, it was limited to the school in territories under the Protestant Reformation, in which the vernacular came to be the cultured language. As for the Portuguese Language, João de Barros established the link between the teaching and regulation of the Language by writing the Grammar of the Portuguese Language in the form of Cartinha, designed to teach children in escolas de ler e contar [schools for reading and counting—primary schools] (see Barros, 1971).

As Georges Gusdorf stressed, the Renaissance phenomenon “lies essentially in the order of human letters”; science, quintessentially, was the philology which, thanks to the meticulous study and knowledge of classical Latin, Greek and Hebrew “enabled access to the new cultural values” (Gusdorf, 1988, p. 22). The Renaissance culture was based on writing. It benefited from printing and the interpretation of classical texts.

MODERN EDUCATION AND THE SCHOOL INSTITUTION: THE NEW PAIDEIA

The concept of institution embodies something that is primary and fundamental, something which, since it is created and transmitted, is instituting. An inclusion principle and an apparent generality reside in institution. Quintilian, in De Institutio Oratoria [Institutes of Oratory], composed of 14 volumes, associated institution with education. Institution-education configured the symbiosis between the epitome of the civilisation process and the long educational programme—from the child to the adult orator (see Buisson, 1911, vol.2, pp. 1723-1725).

The work Institutes of Oratory was resumed, adapted and updated by the reformers of the Renaissance and of Humanism. The curricular plan served to edify forthcoming generations and was rooted in a historical, cognitive and linguistic foundation. The discursive representation of educational gesta and anima, grounded, normative and transmissible, ensured the permanence and fulfilment of the human being. The humanists extended the concept of institution to the social. The function instituteur/institutrice and the action of élever/éduquer, established in modern school pedagogy, preserved the characteristics of benignancy, edification, permanence, creation and universality. Just as it came to be translated into French, the Latin word institution did not lose the sense of education. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais used the verb to institute with a meaning and sense that were not restricted to education (See Buisson, 1911, vol.2, pp. 1733-1756).

In Essays, published in 1580, Michel de Montaigne presented the institution as constitutive and significant of the human being, given the limitations of ‘human science’: “in fact, I only understand that the great difficulty of human science appears to lie in the nourishment and institution of children” (Montaigne, 1969, p. 196). Education was good manners and institutional virtue. By composing Of the Education of Children (1585), Montaigne established that the schoolmaster should question the child on matters of manners and behaviour. This educational basis was illustrated in the following statement: “That he schoolmaster should not only ask questions on the words of the lesson, but also on the meaning and substance, and that his judgement of performance should not be based on evidence of memory, but on life style” (Montaigne, 1969, p. 198).

The Art Schools, established in the transition from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries in Paris, Bordeaux and other European cities, such as Coimbra, developed a pedagogical-didactic model formed by the methodical complex ars vivendi e ars eloquens. The school curriculum was rooted in the grammatical-dialectic relationship, as cognisant rationale and formulation of thought (rhetoric). Functioning as a boarding school, it assured a comprehensive humanistic education, which also included a technical component. Whether in a school or domestic regime, two perspectives were in opposition in the pedagogy of humanist studies. One focused on the use of compendia given to readers-mentors who rehearsed and put into practice a teaching activity applicable to the pupil collective. Another pedagogical perspective favoured the selection of authors and texts, given as a model, in individualized processes, under the supervision and authority of illustrious schoolmasters. The mechanisation of typography, associated with the demand for instruction on the part of the communities (urbanized or ennobled, aspirers to bureaucracy and the financial and trade movement), favoured the industrialisation of teaching and the expansion of the school model. Over time, the school model accommodated full and part-time boarders. Both these systems involved co-funding on the part of the pupils.

Sixteenth century humanism was a synthesis of education and culture. The literate and lettered curriculum, created by the Protestant Reformation, the humanist profiles of the Schools of Humanities and Schools of Art, the Pedagogy of the Jesuits, structured in the Ratio Studiorum were institutional versions of a new paideia. It was education-institution. Education presented the broad spectrum that reached the individual and society. It included the cultural and pedagogic and, by rule, was contextualised and served as an institutional action.

The Society of Jesus, founded in 1542, and established in all Christendom within a few decades, combined missionary and teaching. The educational nucleus of Jesuitism brought together the Spiritual Exercises, the Constitutions and the Ratio Studiorum. The Spiritual Exercises, referred to as such by dint of analogy with the corporal exercises, were challenges and inner trajectories meant to be conducted by the learner-apprentice, enlightened by reading and writing, and duly supervised by a spiritual director. It was an educational internship based on information, pedagogical mediation, transformation (conversion). The Constitutions contained an educational programme formed by the sequence of individual experiences that were supposed to be accomplished by those accepted by the Society. The fourth part of the Constitutions presented both the pedagogical and curricular framework and the formative and evangelizing ideology of the Company. The Ratio Studiorum was the pedagogy; it contained the order of studies and the curriculum. Establishing an (in)formative, cognizant and lettered complex of comprehensive and progressive learning, the Ratio Studiorum articulated the pedagogical and didactic components. And so the school institution emerged as a representation of the education-institution.

Due to their strategic position in the economic and financial landscape, for the urban and republican tradition, the erudite and cultural legacy, the Italian cities, particularly Florence, were cultural, school and editorial centres of attraction and knowledge dissemination. Classicism journeyed from South to North, while scientism and encyclopaedism preferred the Centre-North, and took an inverse path.

In fact, idealism and the polytechnic spread from Central Europe, namely by initiative of the German principalities. Sponsored by Prince Louis d’Anhalt Kötlen, the philosopher and reformer Wolfgang Ratichius, who cultivated the doctrines of Luther, directed a model school and published a pedagogical work in 1618 which included a universal (school) encyclopaedia in German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Italian; a reading book in German; a Latin grammar; a Greek grammar; philosophical treatises. The pedagogy proposed by Ratichius (realshule) brought together intuition and the lesson of things. The study plan included languages and mathematics. Teaching was meant to begin in the native language; focus on actual “things”; be conducive to experience; enable induction, as the superation of adorned knowledge (See Buisson, 1911, vol.2, pp. 1738-1739).

The education-institution marked the common, the transversal and also the unique among peoples and nations, giving foundation to the civilisational. Published anonymously in 1721, the epistolary novella Persian Letters, by Montesquieu, was a collection of writings from between 1711 and 1720. Among other matters, in those letters Montesquieu commented on education, pointing out, acknowledging and comparing civilisational characteristics (uses, customs, habits, lifestyles, tastes) between France and Persia. Associated with education, a recurrent theme in those Letters, was the status of women. Referring to the “pouvoir tyrannique” [tyrannical power] of men and to the “empire naturel” [natural empire] of the beauty of women, Montesquieu observed that the latter was spread across all countries and that the men would do anything to crush the courage of women. He concluded, however, that “the forces would be equal if education were also equal. Let us verify that education has not weakened talent; and we will see if we are as strong” (Montesquieu, 1828, p. 89).

Education ensured understanding among citizens and peoples from different geographical, cultural and civilisational settings. Some of those Letters alluded to erudite education, on the basis of the lettered to the role of the libraries of the magistrates. The Persian Letters contained an approximation to the education-institution.

In the Preface of The Spirit of Laws, published in 1748, the same Montesquieu informed that between 1728 and 1731, he conducted a tour of Austria, Hungary, Italy, Holland and London, under the conviction that historical inquiry and critical comparison were the systematic of the common, the uniform, the changeable and the conventional. He investigated and travelled to observe the institutions; to learn their laws; to infer motives and principles of action. As he refers, he did so, driven by the following belief: “I have examined men, and I have been convinced that, in this infinite diversity of laws and customs they have not been solely driven by their fantasies” (Montesquieu, 1979, p. 115).

He revealed that the first principle he observed was that individual issues remained closed within themselves. He concluded that the histories of nations were no more than consequences and that each specific law was connected to or dependent on another more general one. Each state governed itself in line with the political system adopted, which although not pernicious, since there were beneficiaries, inhibited proposals for change and led the impaired to ignore themselves. In the face of this critical situation, Montesquieu proclaimed, once more, the value of education, a matter he returned to in several stages of The Spirit of Laws. Montesquieu mentioned that, through general instruction, coupled with the political regime, education and human constitution are obtained, as “it is the aim to instruct men, to be able to practice this general virtue which includes the love of all” (Montesquieu, 1979, p. 116). If, in the monarchies, education can be geared towards honour and if, in tyrannies, individuals tend to merge with the government, in the republics, education is the condition of virtue, since “political virtue is the renouncement of oneself, which is always a difficult thing” (p. 160).

Thus, as should be reiterated, in Persian Letters and, more specifically in The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu observed that the education-institution was part of societies and States, and was more than a consequence. It referred to collectives and individuals. Education ensured the preservation of customs and human fulfilment: it was the condition of equality and the means for the functioning and renewal of laws. The singular was generalised through education. Knowledge, virtue, nobility, civility were components of education and obtained through education.

Pascal had also referred to education as second nature and Descartes had admitted the educational virtues of the institution: “a good institution is highly important to remediate defects from birth” (Buisson, 1911, p. 852). La Chalotais, who was also author of a French State Education Plan in the period immediately after the Revolution of 1789. Also admitted that “if humanity is capable of a certain degree of perfection, it is through the institution that it may be obtained” (Buisson, 1911, p. 852).

THE MODERN SCHOOL INSTITUTION

The modern school institution was the visible component of education. It was in possession of materiality, structure, records and symbolic power. According to Louis Marin with regard to the underlying principles of Port-Royal, the main role of the school, and particularly the boarding school, was “to establish another world” which was not merely pedagogical. With a life of its own, detached from the exterior and assuring survival of the interior, the school was a model that made visible what real life camouflaged. The pedagogical closure was the main mark of the ideological gesture of representation, one that was transforming and substitutive (Marin, 1975, p. 212).

As already mentioned, it was through the Ratio Studiorum that the Jesuits organised a vertical school curriculum, focusing on the school as an organisation-school and taking Latin at the school language. Full and half-boarders were admitted. The core of the Study Plan was classicism and corresponded to the Estudos Menores [Minor Studies]. The subjects fell under the logic of the course. The primary schoolmaster was expected to monitor and refine the writing of the pupils who were already attending Latin Grammar, in addition to preparing new pupils for admission to the schools. Each school had its own duly selected premises which were carefully adapted with classrooms, library, government bodies, pupils’ records and its own budget.

The school institution was a part of Catholic and Protestant Europe for which, among other historical information, the encyclopaedic, realistic and intuitive pedagogy implemented by Wolfgang Ratichius has already been mentioned. Jean Amos Comenius, whose magisterium and written work date back to the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, reacted to scholastic classicism by creating a comprehensive school from the primary stage. The study plan was progressive and encyclopaedic. By following a pedagogy inspired by nature, the curriculum included observation and presented a concrete progression towards the symbolic. Studies were meant to depart from the child and in the learning of vernacular language. Latin, as an erudite language, was studied later. Curricular progression began with the observation and denomination of things and places, moving on to numbers and classification, in order to reach, with knowledge and maturity, the symbolic and abstract. Made up of philosophical pampedia, and cultivating a method that would enable the teaching of “everything to everyone” (Coménio, 2006), the school was essentially designed for young children and youths, and became constitutive of thoughtful, cognizant and technical reasoning. The vernacular languages, English, French, German and Portuguese, would be taught from a utilitarian perspective, like mother-tongues and as an introduction to learning and the practice of Latin.

Grammatization of the vernacular languages benefited from the works developed in Port-Royal, for a universal grammar. With the Jansenists and Oratorians, in the transition to the eighteenth century, the small schools were structured, conferring priority upon education, the norm and vulgarisation of living languages. In modern Europe, school and non-school literacy was restricted to the vernacular which, in Protestant Europe, was also the language of religious worship. Lettered education included a general and purified component. In the late seventeenth century, Rabelais, a defender of erudition in education, had already differentiated general language and art education (through compendia and selected texts) and erudite education (based on whole written works and the culture of the classics). In his opinion, erudition corresponded to a new lettered profile and came after general education. The teaching of sciences, material that was part of the curriculum proposed by Comenius, bestowed a realist feature based on comprehensive education upon the school.

In the transition to the eighteenth century, the term school was not used uniformly. Interpretation of the school-compendium, orderly and teachable, based on a method and restricted to the supervision of a schoolmaster, was established in the title of didactic works, such as Escuela Universal de Literatura y Aritmética [Universal School of Literature and Arithmetic], by Diego Bueno, Examiner of Maestros in Zaragoza, published in 1700 (See Domínguez Cabrejas, 2009)^[4], and Nova Escola para Aprender a Ler, Escrever e Contar [New School to Learn, Read and Count], by The primary school master Manoel de Andrade de Figueiredo. It is highly probable that the latter was published in 1722, although some copies were available before this date. It was composed of four treatises, including prints and application exercises.

Given that it balanced method and encyclopaedic compendium, the designation school was used in pedagogical and didactic books and interpreted as comprehensive education. This was also the case in Escola Nova, Christã e Política [New School, Christian and Political], published in 1799, by Leonor Thomasia de Sousa e Silva. In addition to school literacy, composed of an introduction to reading method, this book contained the Christian doctrine; rules on civility and urbanity; geography of the world; the chronology of Portuguese dynasties and monarchs.

From the late seventeenth century, interpretation of the school as a collective of learners (pupils) became common, even in the domestic school system. Progressively, with the regulation and inspection requirement on the part of the religious authorities, civil authorities and for pedagogical recording purposes, the complex of curriculum, method, schoolmaster, book, suitable installations and learning group became an underlying component of the concept of school. Although not exclusively, the school became adapted to the child-youth age group. Correlatively to the formalisation of the school book, configured in the form of a compendium, and using standard and assertive discursive methods, specific to didactics (such as the sentential, catechismal, exercitation, application and verification), new types of texts and books emerged in the field of education. They were textual creations that cultivated new types of text which, without compromising the formal virtues and intentionality, made use of the imagination and creativity to draw in and motivate the reader. Among other resources, new forms of writing, saying and reading were favoured by use of the imaginary and fantastic.

Fénelon who, in the very early eighteenth century, was preceptor and schoolmaster of the Duke of Burgundy, future king of France, practiced collective teaching in a domestic setting by grouping together other grandchildren of King Louis XIV. The writing and school use of the Adventures of Telemachus date back to that experience. This text, in the form of a novel, was composed to facilitate the teaching of culture and classical mythology to the prince and future King of France. Fénelon took up the epic of Telemachus, son of Ulysses, and composed a sequence of short narratives specifically for that group of children. By reading them and making the children recite them by heart, Fénelon took note of the opinions and observations of the children, with a view to improving the texts.^[5]

The convenience of teaching a pupil collective and by bringing together the didactic and fantastic text was assumed by Martinho de Mendonça, in the Prologue to Apontamentos para o Ensino de um Menino Nobre [Notes on the Teaching of a Noble Child], which was written by him and published in 1734. He presented the advantage of collective teaching in the following terms:

Although I recommend a different method of teaching the Latin language to a Noble Child in his home, I would not dare reproach what is commonly used in state schools, and proven by experience, that for a single schoolmaster to teach many disciples of different geniuses and age, is the most comfortable form of teaching (Proença, 1734, n.p.).

As was the case with the afore-mentioned Nova Escola para Aprender a ler, Escrever e Contar, collective teaching was frequently interpreted as an adaptation of preceptorial teaching. With a schoolmaster, a specific place and schedule, the small parochial, episcopal, philanthropical and association schools were locations for the rehearsal of collectivisation methods. The Petites Écoles, created by the action of Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, and the schools of Les Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes emerged throughout the French territory. The school model was also used in British territory and in the German principalities. Collective teaching, with recourse to decurions and monitors, enabled the implementation of shared and gradual teaching possible. Records were kept, and inspections carried out on these schools by the religious, civil and community authorities. Record-keeping benefited the standardisation and transversality of new teaching methods.

The school model, up to the then habitually applied to the Minor Studies (inspired by classicism and composed of trivium and quadrivium subjects), gradually extended to the Fine Arts and later, also to military education. The plan presented by John Milton (1895) in Tractate of Education, published in 1644 should be noted for military education. Designed to meet the needs of 50/100 pupils, the proposed academe was intended to have an ample-sized, multi-functional space. The day of the boarders would be divided into study, exercise and meals. The school language would be English. In Milton’s opinion, the proposed educational model brought together the military and the monastic.

Comenius, as already mentioned, who developed a method for the teaching of the Latin language and also structured teaching in the vernacular, left a plan for schools. Ratichius also created a teaching method in the vernacular, divided into school groups, and was the author of school manuals. Both turned the school into an environment of knowledge, humanisation, citizenship and progress.

The school model was gradually adapted to the different teaching methods and different receivers. The school institution benefited from the curricular, methodical and organisational methods, but was essentially a product of record-keeping and typographical printing. In fact, collective teaching and school vulgarisation are associated with mechanical typography, which made the multiplication of printed matter and school manuals possible.

In the transition to the eighteenth century, primary school was essentially rooted in the collective teaching method, in a selected and adapted space, a curriculum (literacy in vernacular, Christian doctrine, civil precepts), a schoolmaster, and an age group. However, as had been conceived, written and organised by the humanists and modern reformers, the school institution was a material, organisational, curricular and symbolic complex, made up of written information, the educational gesta and pragmatics. This complex took root in a textuality and corresponded to a cognizant, scribal and civil literacy. The idiosyncrasy between schoolmaster and pupil bestowed charisma on the schooling profession.

Georges Snyders concluded that the modern reformists paved the way for synthesis which superimposed method, the book and the school curriculum (Snyders, 1971, p. 321).^[6] Pedagogy and curriculum ensured that, having experienced learning and schooling, the human being would turn into a virtuous and useful citizen. The school model, particularly as a progressive curriculum, collective education and collegiate organisation (traditionally applied to lettered and clerical education) expanded to encompass technical and professional, artistic and military training. The boarding school boosted the institutionalisation of the school.

THE SCHOOL INSTITUTION AND the REPRESENTATION OF EDUCATION

The school institution represents education as the institutional, the ordered and experiential space, the theoretical curriculum and practices, schoolmaster, method, writing. The school was heteronymous and alternative. This complex was formed in the eighteenth century. In Émile, Rousseau recalls the distinction among education, institution and instruction, to which the governor, preceptor and schoolmaster respectively correspond. However, he also points out that these distinctions are not very explicit and, in order for children to be well guided, they should only follow one guide (Rousseau, 1969, p. 88). Furthermore, Rousseau himself refers to the education intended for Émile with the expression “mon institution” (Rousseau, 1969, p. 271). By the end of the eighteenth century, the school complex had already been formed. In effect, by order of the Dean of Coimbra University, Jerónimo Soares Barbosa, applied a survey to the Primary Classes and Schools of the Dioceses of Coimbra, which was composed of items on the space and location of the school, qualifications and standing of the schoolmaster, method, good manners, pupils’ attendance, performance and the relationship of the school with the local community (see Magalhães, 2010, p. 148).

The small schools and boarding schools had spread across Europe and America, not only Catholic but also Protestant institutions. The Enlightenment became associated with schooling. In the mid-eighteenth century in Scotland, where cultural, economic and political development had rapidly developed, a considerable percentage of merchants, able to read Latin and Greek, “the heirs of firms (…) regularly went for one or two years to the university” (Herman, 2001, p. 165). By integrating the school component systematically, the Reform movement moved forward into the second half of the century.

In Portugal, the first half of the eighteenth century was marked by a significant debate on the scientific representation and participation of the Jesuits in education. As with former Congregations, the Jesuits proceeded to update the method of knowledge and science, which had an effect on pedagogy. The Oratorians, to whom King John V gave protection, implemented schools and created vernacular manuals. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Minor Studies reforms were under way, which preceded and opened the way for the reform of the University of Coimbra. Following the fall of the Jesuits, these reforms affected the study plans, contents, methods, compendiums and exams. In view of the verticality of the studies, which culminated in the preparatory schools (with the possibility of continuing on to university), curricular reforms involving the institution-education in a total sense were implemented.

Schooling became associated with the Enlightenment, as well as the British Industrial Revolution and the Political Revolution which extended from France to Europe and America. These large movements consolidated changes of a didactic and pedagogical nature, establishing them in the school reforms.

In Portugal, the Marquis of Pombal’s Educational Reforms, which began in 1759, covered the different educational segments: Primary School, Minor Studies (including the teachings in the Congregations), professional training and the University of Coimbra. The school structure was broadened to artistic, agricultural and technical training. When the College of Nobles was created, the collegiate model was also applied to military training, resuming the boarding school model, practiced in other locations, and, at the time, re-written for the Portuguese context by Ribeiro Sanches in 1759, in Cartas sobre a Educação da Mocidade [Letters on the Education of Youth] (see Sanches, 1922).

Associated with religious, cultural, political and social changes, the school institution was at the root of the political and administrative reforms. In North America, the school institution had been part of the model of establishment, colonisation and missionary since the late seventeenth century. The municipalities and communities of the settlers created schools and colleges. There are references to an intense production of school manuals in the English language. The Liberal Revolutions and the constitution of the Nation-States are unthinkable without literacy and schooling.

In the eighteenth century transition, the school institution was a model and means for evolution, and new gnosiological and pedagogical perspectives, reflecting epistemic changes, were in progress. The teaching of science bestowed a realistic feature on the school and was close to a comprehensive type of education. The encyclopaedia and vernacular dictionaries compiled and popularized scientific, humanistic and technical knowledge. Giving a foundation to education, chronology, geography and history broadened the horizons of the school culture and depicted the human epic as a scenario and evolution. Education and instruction regarded universal history and the history of peoples as the foundation and grounds of the emerging Nation-States. Written, school and educational production was boosted by monumental works such as Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1822) by Jacques Benigne Bossuet, who associated divine determinism with the prerogative of History the teacher of life. In his comments on the topic Historia magistra vitae, Reinart Koseleck (2005, pp. 36-62) admitted that it contains, for the Enlightenment, an approximation between history and education. Exemplariness gave rise to reservations on the part of the sixteenth century authors Jean Bodin and Michel Montaigne. While the former sustained that the formality of history makes it possible to identify deviations, Montaigne expressed reservations towards its generalisation (see Debesse, 1971, pp. 191-265). The educability of history led to the distinction between narrative and event history and, more appropriately, between history and the “fantastic”.

Educational schooling was, to a considerable degree, a product of history and education. History made it possible to reconstitute evolution and contrast the former and the modern. In 1687, Bernard de Fontenelle presented a brief treatise at the French Academy, of which he became a member, entitled “Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes” [Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns], where he established a link, but also a contrast, between Classical Antiquity and Modern Times, resulting from an advance in resources and from the historical and human accumulation of knowledge. He assured that “a good cultivated mind is, so to speak, composed of all the minds of the preceding centuries; it is no more than a same mind that has been cultivated over all this time” (Fontenelle, 2001, p. 307).

Civilisational, national, human and natural history was the observatory, inquiry and lesson. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, writing on history in Opuscule sur l’Histoire, considered it possible to identify the broad lines of the game of human freedom and will, by seeking regularities which, at an individual level, appear to be irregular. He argued that by fulfilling their aspirations, men do not merely follow their animal instincts, like rational citizens, they make use of the broad lines of a development plan (Kant, 1990, pp. 69-70). According to Kant, the idea of a political constitution in keeping with the natural right of men is what underlies humanity, since men ought to obey laws. He concluded that to legislate is at the root of all political forms (Kant, 1990, pp. 218-221). Progress and education preserve and enhance this harmony through reforms. History is constituted by such evolution.

The Kantian legacy of the harmony between the human and writing of the historical complex was the source of inspiration for the nineteenth century school curriculum. Within the scope of the French Revolution, Condorcet, member of the French Academy and sympathizer of the Convention, presented a plan for state education (1791-1792), in which he stressed the importance of the teaching of human and natural history (see Condorcet, 2008). He developed a historical and teachable synthesis, based on the “progress of the human spirit” – Esquisse d’un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l’Esprit Humain, a posthumous publication (see Condorcet, 1988).^[7]

Exemplariness as a pedagogical resource was also explored through the “fantastic”, which enabled the inventive and imagined configuration of integrated and intentional school narratives. The precise use of the imaginary made it possible to attribute meaning and to reorient the human and civilisational epic. In this context, the afore-mentioned educational novel Adventures of Telemachus, written by Fénelon is worthy of mention in the quality of preceptor of the future King of France. Fénelon recreated a fictional narrative in which he criticised and followed on from the Odyssey while simultaneously interweaving critical judgement of the reign of King Louis XIV and enunciated new governmental principles. As already mentioned, this fully translated or adapted novel went on to become part of the readings for schools and adolescents in the vast majority of countries. Fénelon also bequeathed a Treatise on the Education of Daughters.

Another educational work, The Adventures of Diophanes, imitating the highly sagacious Fénelon in his journey of Telemachus, also falling under the scope of the fantastic, was written and recasted in the Portuguese language. Written by Alexandre de Gusmão, under the pseudo name Dorothea Engrassia Tavareda Dalmira, this text was published in 1777, in both Portugal and Brazil. Member of the Society of Jesus, born in Brazil to which he returned to become Bishop of Pernambuco, Alexandre de Gusmão had been secretary to the Portuguese Ambassador in Paris in the Regency period. He socialized with Fénelon there, whose political failure he closely accompanied. The fictional narrative, The Adventures of Diophanes, is a feminine replication of the Telemachus epic, containing dialogues on the situation of women in their family and religious settings and love lives. In the Prologue (Gusmão, 1777), recourse to the “fantastic” is justified in the following terms:

One of the flaws that some may encounter in this work is the fantastic idea, while simultaneously applying the true story; to which I reply that the Spanish, French and Italians persuaded me of this method as they deem it to be the most effective; and since I know nothing of Greek, and barely understand the other languages, in order to avoid begging for old pieces of news, or risk lying by error, I resolved to follow the course of this idea in which the events and fantastic objects, but not the essential, lead to the best ending. (n.p.)

History in the form of romance served the pedagogical cause, making it possible to recreate events and objects and to order them for the desired purpose. John Locke had already distinguished between the short narratives written for didactic purposes and the educational dimension of History. This distinction, also later referred to by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was developed throughout the eighteenth century.^[8] In the afore-mentioned study plan he presented to the Convention, accepted fictional books and stories as a way of recreating natural history, of providing children a denomination and characterisation, a moral sense (Condorcet, 2008, pp. 113 ff.).

The institution-education looked upon pedagogy as a combination of method and order, as it recreated humanistic and scientific knowledge, according to the purposes and audiences. Pedagogy ensured a conciliation between realism and humanism within the school setting.

Educational schooling was a stipulated representation adapted to the written universe. In the constellation of the knowledge of writing, the school book took on a specific configuration and status. In the eighteenth century, encyclopaedias were published in Britain and France, which compiled and systematized the various fields of knowledge. These vernacular encyclopaedias served as a support to the curricular reforms and to the architext formed by the school culture. In Portugal, the Educational Reforms of Pombal, which had led to the implementation of state schools, a school proto-system and curricular verticality, moved forward through the turn of the century and well into the early nineteenth century, expanding the school network and making the University of Coimbra responsible for the supervision of education throughout the country.

Within the context of the French and Western Revolution, in Portugal as in Europe and America, the school institution benefited from successive reforms of study plans in Education and general Instruction. In France, the Convention consigned the idea of standard education in the training of teachers. An institutional sense of national citizenship and rules was attributed to primary education. The University was called upon to supervise education. In the transition to the nineteenth century, the period of peace following the fall of Napoleonic imperialism created an eclecticism in the ways of learning and thinking. The school culture was recreated as a nucleus of classicism, science, technique and vernacular languages. This neoclassic and transnational legacy was progressively adapted and in line with the national traditions and cultures.

The Enlightenment, as a movement of written, scientific, cultural and political acculturation, geared towards progress, established the link between the Educational Reforms (covering secondary, professional and technical education) and preparatory education for entry into University and University Education. Primary School was transformed in the meantime to elementary education; literacy, acquired in the school context, was obtained in the vernacular, as basic communication (mother tongue), integration and an introduction to the culture of the homeland, citizenship and religion. The school-modernisation binomial resumed the internality, complexity and functionality of the school-institution as access, standard, profession and field of writing. Written acculturation was an example of modernity associated with the Nation-State and the political, social and cultural revolution. At a historical and pedagogical level, the schooling of elementary education was guaranteed by the mid-nineteenth century, and the vernacularisation, establishment of state schools and curricular nationalisation processes culminated in the virtuosity of universalisation, the recording of pedagogy and a standardisation of didactics.

Having attained this effect, the nineteenth century became renowned mainly for the constitution and institutionalisation of secondary education. The Enlightenment Reforms and, later on, the convulsions and conventions of the revolutionary period were replaced by neoclassicism and a syncretism of eclectic inspiration. In the second half of the nineteenth century, secondary education benefited from intense national and international debates, opening up to comprehensive education and curricular essays which brought together humanities, science and technical and professional education. Administered by secondary school, the heir of liberal education or, alternatively, obtained through technical, artistic and professional training, secondary education was supposed to have a humanistic and scientific core curriculum and a technical and professional differentiation.

Educational writing had been promoted in its different branches. Henri Pestalozzi, who claimed to be an avid reader of Rousseau, regarded the school as the centre of education, masterminding a structure with backward and forward extensions. In Leonard and Gertrude: a book for the people (1947), originally published in 1781, he resorted to the discursive novel method to write education. He recreated the renovation of a village house as the work of a schoolteacher (Gertrude). With regard to the school, he suggested and sustained that some subjects could not be taught there. The aim of the school was to stimulate former knowledge and behaviour, correlative to school learning. Analogously, there were subjects such as the lesson on things and the teaching of languages in which the school ought to be articulated with the surrounding community. The educational dimensions of education went beyond the school.

The histographical and fantastic narratives and the great treatises paved the way for educational writing. The curricular reforms and plans, associated with a record of schooling (on the materiality and functionality of schools, attendance of the teacher, biographical record of the pupils, their attendance and performance, statistics) constituted pedagogical writing. Access regulations and the teacher’s duties, the inquiries and school inspection reports were part of pedagogical writing. The encyclopaedic and structured compendiums as a sequence to the lessons (Magalhães, 2016), frequently presented in the form of catechism or manual, gave rise to didactic writing.^[9]

INSTITUTIONAL SCHOOLING AS COMPREHENSIVE AND FUTURE EDUCATION

Geared towards establishing literacy, civil pragmatics and catechistic education, elementary school became standardized in the mid eighteenth century. It went on to be governed by the state during the absolutist regimes, was nationalized and mandatory with Liberalism and universalized with Republicanism. Upon organisation of the national educational systems, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the formalisation, uniformity and compulsoriness of elementary schools ceased to generate controversy, neither at an intrinsic level nor in the relationship between the school and society. Fundamental and basic, primary schooling determined an organised society and the education of the Nation-State, and was also in possession of a record-keeping professional; it was universal.

Such was not the case with secondary education, established amidst curricular, pedagogical and sociological decisions. Secondary, scientific, humanistic and technical education projected and ensured the future. Organisation of the curriculum in the form of a course and the discussion of themes (such as secularism) was agreed upon for primary school, however for secondary school it proved to be a source of contention. Hence, in Évolution Pédagogique en France [Pedagogical Evolution in France], which contains course subjects on the History of Teaching in France taught in 1904-05, Émile Durkheim developed “the idea of discovering how our secondary education was established and developed” (Durkheim, 1969, p. 9).

Durkheim believed that by knowing the constitution and evolution of secondary education was a way of systematizing the genealogy of the school-institution. He divided the history of pedagogy course into two broad periods: “Des Origines a la Renaissance” [From the Origins to the Renaissance] and “De la Renaissance a nos Jours” [From the Renaissance to Nowadays]. In this work, almost symmetrical in the division of pages, Durkheim interpreted the word enseignement as being mobile and the central concept for secondary education. At the time, this teaching approach was experiencing “A serious crisis that not for the time being has begun to ease” (Durkheim, 1969, p. 14). The crisis, dating back to the first half of the nineteenth century, was extensive to Europe and based on both internal and external factors to educational schooling. According to Durkheim, it was an institutional crisis:

Pedagogues and men of the state everywhere are aware that the changes resulting in the structure of contemporary societies, in both their domestic economy and their foreign relations, require parallel and equally profound transformations in this special part of our school system. (p. 14)

The interest in secondary education was rooted in a multiple causality, since it was at the centre of the relationship between the school and society. The crisis in secondary education focused on education and could not be resolved by administrative deliberation. The educational reform would have to involve pedagogical education which emerged “as far more urgent for secondary school than for primary school” (Durkheim, 1969, p. 15). Durkheim stressed that the fundamental component of pedagogical education was the history of teaching, given that it is acting in time that the active forces reveal their effects. The man of the moment is of no interest; the man of today will be replaced by the man of tomorrow.

The secondary school issue, central to education, included intrinsic aspects, aspects on the relationship with society, curricular aspects (the teaching of humanities, the teaching of nature) and essentially implied that the doing (“faire”) of each pupil was “a complete reason”. Durkheim concluded that the secondary education unit is man, as “all teaching is necessarily anthropocentric”. The humanists had not fully understood this principle. For the period up to the Renaissance, the instrumental word supporting the institutionalisation of secondary education was the term subjects, while for the modern period it was pedagogy. The type of teaching that proposes a comprehensive education should ensure a triple culture, through the most effective pedagogical means, systematized by Durkheim as: “culture for languages, scientific culture, historical culture” (Durkheim, 1969, p. 399).

The challenge involved idealizing and edifying a school construction with multi, pluri-functional spaces; structuring a multidisciplinary, comprehensive and progressive curriculum; combining liberal, moral and civil education; receiving and making a young adolescent (whose psychological knowledge was only rehearsed) develop; overlapping school, professional and vocational representation; opening the school to the new urbanized, native public or those in transit, from a small service or trade bourgeoisie, or the children of a small agricultural aristocracy. However, as well perceived by Durkheim, the training and pedagogical and didactic standardisation of a teaching professional was no less of challenge. These professionals were traditionally recruited from the lettered, a man of a curricular subject, adverse to pedagogical conciliation and the constitution of a school framework in the form of a course and learning group.

The secondary school crisis consequently became an educational crisis. The idea of the present involved primary education, which had become universal and mandatory in the meantime; but the idea of the future, at an intrinsic level and in the relationship between the school and society was through secondary education. Both, however, were grounded in the school institution.

Throughout the twentieth century, it underwent structural reforms. Neither was there any uniformity nor simultaneity of processes, however with the universalisation of primary education, the general tendency was towards a comprehensive and sequential type of secondary education. The core curriculum was a source of controversy. There were educational systems which, while safeguarding the core curriculum, maintained the distinction between humanistic and scientific profiles and technical scientific profiles. Nevertheless, institutional schooling was synonymous of comprehensive education and paved the way for the notion of future.

CONCLUSION

Giving substance and meaning to a first and second modernity, institutionalisation of the school bestowed foundation, method and universality to the written culture; it gradually articulated the lettered profiles; it legitimised educational schooling as socialisation, access and participation; it enabled the school process and culture to become the condition for and concretisation of sociability and humanity. This complex integrated the constitution and development of the school as an institution: culture, location, time, specific to instruction and education. Between the end of the Middle Ages and the late nineteenth century, the school was constituted and educational schooling was at the core of the institution-education. The school focused on the most significant aspects of education: good manners, knowledge and behaviours. By evolving and reconfiguring itself, the school institution became tailored to the socio-cultural functions of segmentation, comprehension and diversification. Given the broad spectrum of social norms, and those of the Nation-State in particular, schooling corresponded to the technology of the social, ordering and hierarchizing individuals and citizens. Educational schooling was the performative matrix of the individual as a citizen and human person. The school passage had been prolonged and configured as content, a transforming and educational sequence. School order was the thinking and cognizing reason; school disposition and legitimacy assured social technology.

The modern educational institution was grounded in the institution-education and found substance, configuration, means and process in the school institution. The school represented an alternative model, content and experience in which the learner was constituted. Written culture was the symbolic, epistemic, scientific, technical and professional field in which rationality, thought, pragmatics and knowledge were configured and evolved. The scientific pedagogical languages gave substance and meaning to institutional schooling, making an educational curriculum and model possible. The core of this complex articulated written culture, the school, society and development. The school institution brought together different spheres at symbolic, functional and configurative levels: mandatory, cultural, curricular, pedagogical, didactic and institutional. The formalisation of writing enabled the organisation and discipline of the learning collective. In the transition from the first Modernity, access to written culture and the qualification for lettered duties were associated with the institution and culture of the school.

The education-institution refers back to the transition from the medieval, congregating customs, lifestyles, ways of thinking, knowledge and written communication. The school institution emerged and evolved, leading to humanistic written acculturation and erudition. Later, it also ensured artistic, scientific, technical, professional and military training. These branches evolved in a unique manner and affected the inter-disciplinary perspective. The institution-education gave rise to the school institution as a singularity and other world. The school institution evolved, segmenting itself, verticalizing and recreating the social, cultural and political. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the school-institution was already the total-school.

Humanism, the Protestant Reform, the Catholic Reform took the Renaissance as the basis of education, and these movements constituted institutional schooling. The structure of basic education accompanied the vernacular and was institutionalised through primary school. The universalisation of basic schooling through primary schools, made mandatory by the Liberal Revolutions and Republicanism, was an underlying feature of the Enlightenment. Secondary schooling was rooted in collegial tradition; it benefited from the Reformas Ilustradas dos Estudos Menores [Enlightenment Reforms of Primary Education] and the curriculum adjustment to new lettered profiles of the industrial revolution and the modernisation of public administration. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, institutional schooling had finally become more akin to the notion of comprehensive education. Institutional schooling was determined by secondary education as an organisational model composed by comprehensive education, pedagogy and architectural and curricular spaces. This idiosyncrasy is what consolidated modern school education.

Paving the way for a second modernity, the school institution corresponded to institution-education. The school institution included primary education made mandatory and universal. Secondary education as comprehensive and future education represented education and institutional schooling, combining written culture, institution, education and training; it constituted a transforming totality of the individual. With the nineteenth century, and having overcome the idea of preparatory studies and created the need for a participative and critical citizenship, the notion was enhanced that secondary school education was synonymous with comprehensive education, the engine of progress, constitutive of modern ethical and rational frameworks, a cultural benchmark, technology of the social, the future. On appealing to a pedagogical reform, Durkheim sought to reformulate institutional schooling in its entirety, beginning with the training of teachers. The history of modern school education is rooted in primary schooling, but gained meaning in the institutionalisation of secondary education.

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