The noise of the living and the silence of the dead: public histories of education in between pandemics in the “rural” Portugal (1918–2021)

Abstract

ABSTRACT More than ever, the space of history of education is defined by its specialised communities as much as by the people who participate in the educational process, including those who have been historically left out of it. It is these people (along with the historian) who build the history of the present time and the archives of public memory. In an increasingly virtualised and viralised world, the problem of public use of historical research appears, in the educational arena, as a condition of possibility of scientific knowledge itself. Today, the dilemma of history is no longer to respond to the challenges provoked by the social sciences but, on the contrary, to face the crisis of their postulates. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemics, we are confronted with blunt evidence: we don’t need more knowledge, we need other knowledges. We are required to reposition our gaze from the macro into the micro scale. This article aims to bring into the historical picture of contemporary education the living people and archives left out of it, in the last century. Based on oral and written testimonies of people who lived in between pandemics (1918–2021) in Portuguese rural contexts, we seek to write a history (and a historiography) of education for the people, about the people, and by people. In short: a Public History that is able to confront the immediate present with a quasi-recent past, the noise of the living with the silence of the dead.