Literacy and basic education

a central dimension of adult education in Portugal

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the research carried out as part of a doctoral thesis, we analyze the process of literacy and basic education of adults in Portugal, in the period between the thirties of the nineteenth century and the mid-eighties of the twentieth century. The authors start from a theoretical framework that recognizes the impossibility of a neutral or apolitical education, placing themselves in a critical perspective in relation to pedagogical, economic or merely managerial perspectives of the educational phenomenon. The research was based on a process of documentary research and analysis, from primary and secondary sources, and on an analysis and discussion of the existing educational and pedagogical literature on the subject. The work carried out allowed us to characterize the periods, the initiatives or determining stages of its historical path, its integration in the broader contexts of the various dimensions of adult education and popular education, of which it is an integral part; it also allowed us to highlight the structural links between the process of literacy and basic education and the processes of industrialization and urbanization of Portuguese society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as to account for the tensions, conflicts and ambiguities that this process raised among the various groups and social classes and the institutions that represented them.