Faria de Vasconcelos and the Didactics of Natural Sciences in the contex of the First Republic

Abstract

In the Preface that Adolphe Ferrière affixed to Faria de Vasconcelos' book, A New School in Belgium, from 1915, he says that the School of Bierges-les-Wavre that the distinguished Portuguese pedagogue founded in 1912 (and that he had to abandon in 1914 force by the outbreak of the First World War) fulfilled 28 of the 30 programmatic points of the New School. Thus, the figure of Faria de Vasconcelos is established as a pillar of this movement of pedagogical renewal that swept, like a hurricane, the educational panorama, on the scale of the so-called Western world, in the first quarter of the 20th century. Faria de Vasconcelos was not a theorist, researcher and scientist of education. But insofar as he was an executive, who in Belgium, Switzerland, Cuba and Bolivia, exercised management functions in educational establishments, published several texts and apologetic articles of the New School, advised politicians (he is the backbone of educational reform that in Portugal became known as the Camoesas Reform), he was one of the authors of this Copernican revolution. In this article, we review a handbook that Faria de Vasconcelos produced in 1919 when he was director of the Normal School de Sucre, in Bolivia, designed to guide the training of teachers for the teaching of natural sciences. Handbook that was later published in 1923 in Portugal, with the same intention, in the framework of a collection of Didactics coordinated by him. In preparing this handbook, Faria de Vasconcelos reviews the best that had been written in the field of science education (the work focuses on the teaching of Biology and Geology), in Europe and the United States of America to retain, selectively, which best suits his pedagogical convictions, marked by the firm, and convinced commitment to the ideas of his friends and co-religionists at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva. Thus, this effort results in a syncretic text, but very useful to serve the agenda of updating primary school teachers, at its two levels, in terms of science education. This text also seeks to contextualize the work of Faria de Vasconcelos in the global framework of the reforms with which the First Republic sought to recover Portugal from the atavistic backwardness that characterized Portugal in the first quarter of the 20th century.