We evoke here events that took place in an ordinary school, the Teacher Training College in Coimbra (Portugal), during the on-going revolutionary process ("processo revolucionário em curso"; PREC), in an attempt to understand people's actions within the collective becoming of a certain time and place, and to grasp how memory works as a…

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the cultural panorama in Portugal was largely dominated by education issues. The awareness of the weaknesses of the Portuguese education system was now based on a growing interest in statistics, which allowed the reinforcement of arguments regarding the country's backwardness and the need to…