Public Portuguese School was formally born in 1772, under the sponsorship of the Minister Marquês de Pombal. The 1772’s law showed the Government's will of creating schools in all the districts and gradually in all the parishes. The French invasions during the first decade of 1800’s followed by the Civil War till 1834, delayed the implementation of this law. Deprived of financial means the Portuguese State have been surpassed in its obligation by civic associations and individual initiative that allowed to accelerate the slowed evolution of elementary education desired for all the Portuguese people. History of schooling in Portugal is far from being written. In such a small country it seems to be possible to better understand this reality by structuring a systematic research gathering different researchers with a centralized management centre.

How had young people accessed elementary education in Portugal during the last two centuries? What kind of institutions promoted elementary education? What were their promoters’ concerns? Who were them? How have they (been able to) led their projects? Where were these institutions? Have their distribution along the country obeyed to any criteria? How far were they from the villages where young people lived? How do people remember that time? What do their memory privilege when having to talk about it?

In this paper we intend to describe the recently started research project mentioned above within a Teachers Training Institute that holds six Teachers Training schools along the country. The project pretends to gather data about elementary education in Portugal which we know had been settled in very different ways along the educational system evolution particularly since the XIXth Century: domestic education, parochial classrooms, schools with a huge variety in their goals, syllabus, architecture, didactic material, furniture, and so on.

The research team includes at least two or three professors from each of the involved Teachers Training schools as well as the students that will work in the field learning how to apply research instruments and developing research skills concerned to observation, listening, gathering physical documents or personal narratives and afterwards experiencing archive tasks and data analysis. Some master and PhD students will develop their thesis in the project too. The main goals of this project are: 1. to map as far as possible the different forms of elementary educational institutions in Portugal; 2. to make memory of them by constructing school's biographies and 3. to provide the constitution of an archive that will give place to a virtual museum.

This project arises in a particularly relevant moment as during the last year the Portuguese Government has ordered the closing of many primary schools arguing with the decreasing of the number of children especially in the interior layer of the country, under a hard contesting popular movement. This is the time to gather living memories as well as cultural material both from these schools as from others attended by elder people which testimonies we are nearly to lose.

We will show some of the first results of this project.

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