Students memories in the beginning of the twentieth century

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse aspects of the recollections of school attendance of people who studied during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It accords with accounts given by ten men and ten women. These accounts were analysed starting from the concept that an individual is socially and historically determined, which made possible a contextualisation of the language from a reference point in the history of education, as well as analyzing the narratives as a product of the memory, from the conceptual viewpoint of Halbwach. The development of the article is principally centred on two aspects of the accounts: the difficulties encountered by the subjects in remaining at school, and the comparison of the past and the present. The statements show both what is personal in the listed memoirs, as well as what they bring from a historical moment, allowing a glimpse of what, for those individuals, remains from their everyday schooling.