Child ? Portuguese childhood in the dictionaries and socio-educational and legal discourses (19th century and 20th century)

Abstract

The historical-educational study analyses conceptions of the Portuguese child/childhood existing in dictionaries and juridical-social and educational discourses, in the 19^th century and early 20^th, with a reference to the 'other childhood', that which was outside the norms or outside society. Based on a hermeneutic methodology, we will analyse these conceptions, knowing that there is not a single child or a single childhood, but children/childhoods differentiated and transformed by the circumstances and social impositions of each epoch. The objectives are diluted in the three points of the text: to understand the etymological meanings/conceptions in the dictionaries about the child/childhood; analyse the design and nomenclatures of 'another childhood'; to deepen the sense of 'another childhood' in the legal-social and socio-educational discourses about its protection and intervention measures. The child/childhood are social constructions belonging to a sociohistorical and cultural time and of a society, which originated approaches and values for the (Social) History of Childhood or Education.