History of school subjects and history of education: some reflections

Abstract

In the context of a renovation of the historiography of education in Brazil, there have been a growing number of studies trying to understand how certain knowledges became school knowledges proper. These studies have contributed to improve our under-standing about the role played by the school and by other social organizations in the definition of what has been regarded at different times as essential in the formation of the new generations. This field of study has been identified to what has been called History of School Subjects, a multidisciplinary approach that has been developed by researchers around the world during the last decades. The article constitutes a bibliographical essay, and seeks to identify and problematize research trends in this area within the wider field of the History of Education. Lastly, it briefly describes two studies carried out recently by Brazilian researchers in the areas of Physical Education and Artistic Education that can be included in this line of investigation. Despite the rising number of studies carried out around this topic, the majority of works, often dedicated to outline chronologically and retrospectively the presence of a specific knowledge at school, are conducted in isolation, and adopt assumptions - many times rigidly - coming from the didactic transposition or school culture traditions. We believe that it is only by conducting periodic assessments that the process of transformation and/or construction of knowledges into school knowledges proper can be made intelligible, both from an empirical perspective and from a theoretical point of view.