Portugal was under a dictatorship since 1926 until 1974, characterized by a fascist way of government with an ideological framework based in the trilogy «God, Nation and Family». The regime established censorship and political police, a concentration camp in Tarrafal, Cabo Verde and poverty affected a large majority of the population. The educational system was one of the major instruments of ideological control. There was single-sex education until the early seventies and, in 1970, only 40% of children between 10 and 14 years were in school. This was a major problem of Portuguese society at the time, the lack of educational democratization with low access to education, particularly by poor working-class children (Medina, 2008).

Despite this social context, it was in schools and universities that one of the most significant resistance movement to the dictatorship arose. Student’s raised up in various moments, especially after the colonial war has begun. The best-known moments are the academic crises of 1962, in Lisbon, and in 1969, in Coimbra, with strikes on exams, public protests against repression and demanding the educational democratization and access to university for all students, regardless of social origin (Cardina, 2008). Nevertheless, students from Porto were also organizing themselves. There was an environment of permanent confrontation and subversion of the established order in schools and universities at the early seventies. The imprisoning of students and the expulsions from schools became often. In 1973 “students represented the 43.5% of all political prisoners” (Accornero, 2012:1043).

After the revolution between 1974 and 1976 there was a time of great turbulence and, civil and political participation. Several authors had characterized this participation as singular and unrepeatable, but Guya Accornero (2012), analyzing the student movement using Sidney Tarrow's contribution of «protest cycles», has argued that participation in the revolutionary period depended heavily not only on the perceived opportunities to mobilize, but also, and to a large extent, on the previous repertoires and organizations that in a way prepared the social context for what came to be verified. It seems that analyzing student’s movement in the late years of portuguese dictatorship could help to better understand how political participation during fascism helped to create the context to the popular participation explosion after the revolution and at the same time also helped to shape today’s educational system.

During the Portuguese dictatorship, students made it possible to organize themselves, demand for changes in pedagogical aspects, protest against the regime and produce hundreds of documents and periodical publications for propaganda and self-education. At the same time their organizations constituted «freedom islands» (Carrillo-Linares & Cardina, 2012) where different and confrontational values had space to grow even within fascism and its conservative ideological framework.

In a time of world and European uncertainty, with political phenomena like Brexit, protests for independence in Catalonia, growing tension in the Middle East, refugee crisis, growing xenophobic and nationalist sentiments, the importance of analyzing the past is added because this is not just an exercise of contemplation, it is about understanding how the past shaped the present, especially about our democratic life and our civic engagement and participation (Caramelo, Fitzsimons & Menezes, 2019; Loff & Menezes, 2015; Medina, Pacheco & Caramelo, 2012).

In terms of education and student movements, this understanding has two central aspects: on one hand, understanding student mobilization during fascism can help us to draw important lessons about social and political participation, on the other hand, this analysis helps to understand what it meant to be student at the time, how the education system was characterized then, and how it changed after the revolution.

Nowadays, it is still possible to find a set of student leaders who participated in student associations from different schools and colleges of Porto, during fascism. These activists can testify about their experience before and during the Revolution, and can report to us the demands of the student movement, the struggles waged, the repression experienced and the way they lived the revolution and the transformations of the educational system then operated. Collecting these testimonies and memories and preserving them makes it possible to contribute to a more comprehensive historical view of the student movement, particularly about the student movement in Porto. At the same time, many of these persons have in their possession a diverse set of documents produced by different student associations and organizations, whose relevance for the analysis of the different expressions of the student movement is unquestionable. The main goal of this paper is to present some results of a pre-analysis of documents produced by students’ associations of Porto between 1969 and 1974. It´s part of a broader qualitative study based in oral history methodology (Thompson, 2017). From eight personal files of activists, 790 documents were collected and scanned until now. Of these, 350 documents were entered into a database, categorized and analyzed. These documents are essentially election programs of the student’s associations, flyers about protests, political demonstrations, strikes but also petitions, posters and periodical publications edited by student´s associations. We proceed to the analysis of each one according to the following pre-defined categories: number of pages, document format, type of document, title, subtitle, date, authorship, location, referenced names and educational claims. A summary was produced for each document and keywords were defined. It was possible in the undated documents, to cross with the whole file and through the subject to try to date the year of the event in question. The referenced names allow, through the crossing of the files, to complete information about the protagonists in question. The described claims include educational and more general claims allowing us to know the most important issues at times. The work of documentary categorization allows, through the crossing with the reference literature, to establish the main moments of student’s contentious actions, forms of action, the intervening organizations, the existing claims and the main intervening parties.

The analysis of these documents points to an increased participation in the late dictatorship years. Despite the prohibition of student’s associations there was this kind of organization in almost every major schools and colleges in Porto. Student´s claims evolved from questioning and demanding independence and legalization of student’s associations to question the segregation of poor working-class students from educational system. At the seventies, students were questioning everything from the colonial war till pedagogical issues and the extreme hierarchical and conservative structure of schools and colleges. The documents analysis stresses the existence of complex ways of organization that students were able to develop to overcome censorship, political police and repression. On the other hand, document´s reveals the importance that students gave to solidarity, making every expulsion and prison a new reason to protest. The actions of secondary school students are particularly impressive, especially against exams. The denunciation of an education based on a single exercise of memorization and without any connection to reality, as well as the fight against distinction between regular secondary and vocational education and their connection to social division between manual and intellectual work illustrates the deep political discussion and reflection among students. After the revolution, the structures developed by students, in each school and college, were also fundamental to the democratization process, with free elections in each school and college of new direction boards, were student´s had representation and in the political purges of previous directors and teachers in every school (Pinto, 2008). Many of the educational changes in the revolutionary period of 1974–76, such as changes in schools and colleges subjects contents, decompression of teacher-student relationships or the temporary unification of regular and vocational education, were object of discussion and demands already present in students’ documents before the revolution.

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