In May 1870, in Portugal, a revolution put as a Minister for the Army, António da Costa (1824-1892) who was already known as a politics and a writer, especially concerned about the public education and the delay of Portuguese politics on regard of the subject. But he quickly moved into a newborn Ministry, the first Portuguese Ministry of Public Instruction, which existence he earlier defended in one of his books (1868). In sixty nine days he developed three legal texts that were approved by the Parliament and published to be settled: the reform of primary instruction, the implementation of high schools for female teachers’ training and the creation of popular libraries in small villages as a way of spreading instruction. António da Costa justified the proposed changes with a set of statistical data gathered from other European countries and from the United States, comparing a various sort of data and revealing a deep knowledge of what was going on around the ‘civilized world’. Unfortunately, those legal texts had not had practical appliance as this Government failed in September 1870 and the new team of politics decided to forget what had been done before. Concerning to education the just approved laws fell down with the Ministry of Public Instruction and were replaced by the former laws of 1844; the just born Ministry got back to the ancient form of a ‘Secretariat of the Kingdom’s Businesses'. Coming from an aristocratic and liberal family with many preeminent figures in military services to the nation as well as in social care and cultural promotion of the poor with recognized pedagogic intervention held by his cousin Teresa de Saldanha, her mother and her sister-in-law, António da Costa revealed to follow the principles’ thread of his owns which is particularly interesting as in former researches we had already found the same particular traces. Regarding the Portuguese educational system’s evolution the study of this figure’s course in both politics and pedagogical intervention in local structures as in spreading his thoughts and studies’ results by his books and conferences underlines some of the most relevant causes of the delay in progressing which are much more related to the constantly ‘come and go’ of the governments than to the quality of the politics or to value of the pedagogical thought producing.

This rich documental corpus is sometimes full of silences: we should have to search for a lot of documents from different types to understand the real meaning of what he publicly said in his formal writings. This work is not yet complete as we still wonder where to find some particular writings like private letters, discourses, articles from or about him in newspapers or magazines that could give any information about his biography and the man himself to enlighten the person and his real way of conceptualizing the expressed ideas. For this paper we gathered the legal texts and the books written by him at the National Library of Lisbon, inserted in the Diary of the Portuguese Government, as well as some of his books (not yet re-edited) and submitted them to content analysis.

D. António da Costa’s thinking remained in his legal texts but also in his books where he developed the pedagogical thread of his political action as well as the urgency of both political developments towards a national educational system to everyone and the private commitment with the spread of basic instruction all over the country. Claiming for an educational system based on the commitment of local structures as municipalities and parishes he left us a rich documental corpus unique at the time and for a long time after, where he explained his point of view regarding the urgency of instructing the young girls as well as of implementing a kind of pedagogy that respected the human being as a ‘self’, as an important part of human society, responsible for its progress.