Abstract
During the Portuguese dictatorship (1926–1974), the former president Oliveira Salazar started to slowly open the regime to European policies after World War II. In 1960, the Minister of Education, Leite Pinto, integrated Portugal in the OECD Mediterranean Regional Project, which was created to improve the educational system in developing countries.
This educational and planning policy was an opportunity to rethink the design of school building, according to the debate and the practices being developed in Europe, namely, in England. The participant countries – Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia – promoted a set of activities to increase their knowledge, focused on educational planning, architectural education, prefabricated construction and open classroom practices. In this context, between 1964 and1968, the Portuguese Work Group for School Buildings presented the first standardized projects for primary, preparatory and secondary schools that were built all over Portugal until 1984.
This chapter will analyse this democratizing process of the authoritarian educational system focusing on four topics: (1) the educational policies and their implementation, (2) the design methodology concerning the architectural paradigms and the pedagogical practices, (3) the school buildings and learning spaces design and (4) the connection between design and governing behaviour.
This research has the financial support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, in the frame of the Strategic Plan (UID/SOC/50012/2013) and the research project ATLAS of School Architecture in Portugal _ Education, Heritage and Challenges (PTDC/ATP-AQI/3273/2014).
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Notes
- 1.
António Ferro was the Director of the propaganda state department. The activities organized by this department were framed by the Politics of the Spirit, to promote the ‘aestheticization of politics’ and the politicization of art.
- 2.
In 1940, the regime carried out the commemoration of two centenaries of the Independence: the foundation of Portugal, 1140, and the restoration of Independence conquered from Spain in 1640.
- 3.
The Centenary Plan for the construction of primary schools in all Portuguese territory (Plano dos Centenários in Portuguese) was part of Salazar’s nationalist policies framed by the Double Centenary Commemoration of Portuguese independence.
- 4.
The Plan of 1938 was defined by the Ministry of National Education to promote the construction of several secondary school buildings, named Lyceum (Liceu). This policy was welcomed by teachers who created a journal named Liceus de Portugal (Lyceum of Portugal).
- 5.
CLASP Development Group was a Consortium of Local Authorities created in the UK in 1957 to develop new methods of standardization to support the mass construction of schools.
- 6.
Eric Pearson, James Nisbett, Lizz Gibson or Alexander King
- 7.
Ana Patrícia Almeida’s PhD thesis collects the documents relating GTSCE’s projects, namely, reports and letters between institutions and international biography (Almeida 2015, p. 295).
- 8.
Parque Escolar is a State company created in 2007 to promote the modernisation of the secondary school buildings, following the British programme, Building Schools for the Future.
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Moniz, G.C. (2018). Democratic Schools for an Authoritarian Regime: Portuguese Educational and Architectural Experiences in the 1960s. In: Grosvenor, I., Rosén Rasmussen, L. (eds) Making Education: Material School Design and Educational Governance. Educational Governance Research, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97019-6_3
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