Tensions and Transformations in the Context of Education Under the Lenses of a Sociodynamic Perspective

The school of the “Estado Novo” period reflects a moment of transformations in the Portuguese political-social and cultural sphere, characterised by authoritarianism, censorship, corporativism and social control of the state. During this period, the education system was influenced by the regime’s ideology, which emphasised the trinity “God, Homeland and Family”, an alignment with the Catholic Social Doctrine and a mechanism of political-social control over teachers and students. Spread throughout the national education system and regulated by Normative Acts that legislated education policies, the regime’s ideology significantly impacted educational dynamics.
Starting from the premise that political-cultural and economic-social contexts influence
education policies with an impact on the social microcosm of the school, this paper proposes a sociodynamic perspective of memory to verify how the tensions and transformations in the context of education manifest themselves in the testimonies of teachers who taught in this period of the Estado Novo. Starting from a phenomenological qualitative approach was adopted in 23 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2017 and 2019 with teachers who taught during the Estado Novo. From a vertical cut in the dataset, 18 interviews were analysed whose participants’ profiles shared the most significant number of common characteristics.
The teachers’ narratives highlighted the impact of the regime on the classroom, both in physical and psychological aspects. Themes such as the iconography of the classroom to the contents of the textbooks, as well as the standardisation of procedures related to the marriage of female teachers, teacher-spouse law and even the surveillance of the State police (PIDE), emerged in the recollections.
The interviewees recounted their experiences as students and teachers and the regime’s
longevity (1933–1974). In this sense, the tensions and transformations in education were
referred to at some moments with some conformism, while comparisons between the past and the present highlighted aspects related to discipline and respect at school and valuing the teaching profession. The social and temporal dialogue of school memories revealed itself in the recollections around these themes, the socio-economic conditions of the pupils and the material limitations in some village schools. The past-present mnemonic exercise highlighted elements of the sociodynamic matrix in the resignification of the biographical events insofar as the past lived was observed regarding the narrated present.
It was verified that the social memory of the school reveals transformations and tensions that make explicit the challenges encountered by the teachers for the teaching practice and the influence of these elements in the memory of the teachers who taught in the school at the time of the Estado Novo. The sociodynamic perspective helps to detect the narrative elements that indicate the relevance of the context (time and space) in the (re)significations of the social memory of the school, the transformations and tensions and the influence of these elements in teaching practice.