In this paper, I undertake an archaeo-genealogy of Handwork as a subject to the school curriculum in Portugal, between 1900 and 1940, questioning what kinds of people were being fabricated (Martins 2020). The Portuguese pedagogical scene develops in the midst of sharp political struggles: between republicans and monarchists, a fight that ended with the establishment of the Republic (1910), and between the various republican factions, to which an end was put with the Military Dictatorship (1926) and the Estado Novo (1933).

The short republican period enabled new progressive education projects, particularly the New School’s. Social Education, the mouthpiece of the New School in Portugal, edited by the anarchist professor Adolfo Lima, is one of the many that published the 30 characteristics of a New School type. Three of its items are dedicated to handwork, especially carpentry and what they called free work (Lima, 1924). This idea was nurtured in Portugal from the international influence centered on the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneve (Figueira, 2004) and, indirectly, from the American pragmatist John Dewey’s work (Ó et al., 2022). Dewey (1900) himself referred to the manual training when he needed to “confine” to just one aspect that characterizes the movement of the new school.

The defense of manual work to achieve the democratization of schooling within New School principles was promoted by the quartet of educators António Sérgio (1883-1969), Adolfo Lima (1874-1943), António Faria de Vasconcelos (1880-1939) and Álvaro Viana de Lemos (1881-1972), the latter being the responsible for the development of this topic. The first three stood out in the more intellectual task of explaining the principles by which Handwork should be included in all Portuguese schools and defending it before the authorities. Álvaro Viana de Lemos, in this context, was fully responsible for unfolding how this could actually be done in schools, explaining it directly to teachers (Ó et al., 2022). Lemos stood out with a practice-based proposal to use Handwork as a possible methodology, considering that, like “drawing and writing”, it is “another means of general culture necessary in the teaching of almost all subjects” (1929, p. 11).

In the 1920s, Lemos embraced the teacher training profession at the Escola Normal de Coimbra, becoming a reference for the Handcrafts topic in the country. He became close to the New School movement in his multiple study trips, habitually representing Portugal in all the New Education congresses in Europe. Lemos exchanged letters with pedagogues from all over the world, such as Adolphe Ferrière. But, after political persecution, he was arrested in 1934 and consequently abandoned his teaching career (Nóvoa, 1991, 1995).

Lemos was a driving force and a link between international associations and anonymous Portuguese teachers. There is evidence of his influence and of the New School proposal (Cantos, 1928), presenting manual work as a method and constituting this dominant current in the ideology of Portuguese educational pedagogy until around 1940. His transdisciplinary and democratic proposal was repressed and replaced by the Handwork school subject, which served as a guarantee of the elitization of arts education (Flor, 2009; Penim, 2000). The Handwork subject was based on a directive and authoritarian pedagogy, thus fulfilling the power device that segments and specializes any school discipline (Foucault, 1971).

The Military Dictatorship government (1926) that establishes the Estado Novo (1933-1974), monitors the defense of a discipline or disciplinary area that quickly replaces the transdisciplinary hypothesis held by Lemos. This paper aims at understanding the cultural theses that underlie both curricular hypotheses - that of manual work as a method or as a discipline - which involve certain types of subjects (Martins, 2020).

This paper undertakes a research in-between “archaeology” and “genealogy”. The idea of archeology is recovered from the need to understand the discursive formation of Handwork as a school subject and the contribution of each faction to expand the field of possibilities (Foucault, 1969, 1971). In turn, the idea of “genealogy”, first undertaken by Friedrich Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals and later adapted by Michel Foucault, is recovered from the appropriations rehearsed regarding a history of arts education in Portugal (Ó, Martins & Paz , 2013; Szawiel, Ó & Vallera, 2021), showing that the non-democratic nature of arts education has a non-essential, contingent and non-necessary historical meaning. Foucault is “not an historian of continuity, but of discontinuity” (Poster, 1982, p. 117), as he defends the failure of a linear and progressive history, in favor of a non-linear, spiral history, without any teleological principle, in which events sometimes end up in discontinuities (Foucault, 1968). This archeo-genealogy undertakes a documental quest and analysis, which includes written and visual sources: letters between pedagogues, expert discourses and curricular syllabus and images showing manual work. The following series will be worked on: legislation where the understanding of manual work is expressed; Handwork school manuals for Teacher Training and Secondary Schools; pamphlets and pedagogical press; personal collection of Álvaro Viana de Lemos, including correspondence. The National Library of Portugal, several university libraries and the virtually unexplored collection of Álvaro Viana de Lemos (Nóvoa, 1991, 1995), deposited at the headquarters of the Modern School Movement, will be the central elements to answer the following questions: - How was manual work defined as a discipline, disciplinary area or method, between 1900 and 1940, within the scope of different political currents? -What is the role of Lemos and his network in the dissemination and adaptation of pedagogical ideas in circulation about manual work? - What kind of persons are being promoted, namely by the advocates of New School in the republican and in the New State formula? To what extent do these models move away and approach? This research undertakes a double gesture of an ambiguous and uneven history. On the one hand, because it falls on an object of study that suffers a sudden displacement, due to political circumstances. On the other hand, because genealogy is itself capable of underlining discontinuities and was itself discontinued in many academic contexts.

It was very hard for pedagogues to install the New School movement in Portugal even in the short political period of the First Republic (Nóvoa, 1991, 1995; ò et al. 2022). It was partially appropriated in distorted and minimalist formats within Military Dictatorship (1926-1933) and more seriously within the Estado Novo (1933-174), regimes that created an ambiguous narrative about the diffusion of the principles of the New School as being their own. In the case of Handwork, a filed rarely explored in Portugal (Flor, 2009; Penim, 2004) and in Europe (Dittrich, 2019), there is a strong disciplinary vocation, which was evoked by pedagogues of all kinds (Dewey, 1900). In fact, Dewey had already promoted a connection with manual work due to this disciplinary feasibility (Van Gorp, 2021). But in Portugal, a country still at the dawn of industrialization and schooling in 1900, handwork as a school subject was still little requested, as manual work was still being used in family and first jobs apprentice (Ó, Martins and Paz, 2013; Szaviel, Ó & Vallera, 2021). In these circumstances, the essence of the debate takes place essentially in the 1920s, when Lemos gradually occupies the position of specialist about all educational kids of manual work. Inspired by Dewey, whom he knows better and better through the anarchist Adolfo Lima (Ó et al. 2022), Lemos works both in defending the principles of the Escola Nova and in maintaining a correspondence with the whole country, as personal or imbued with teaching associations. Inspired by Foucault, this investigation aims at denaturalizating what has always been known, in this case about the Handwork school subject now in the verge of extinction, by showing that there were other possible configurations, which disappeared due to political objectives, and thus that many other possibilities are still with us.

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