Portuguese Secondary Schools: Places of Education and Networks of Complicity.Alentejo Elites’ Progress through School and Professional Career,Development 1841–1960

Abstract

The aim of this paper is the relation between the local elites and the secondary level scool in Alentejo during the 19 th and 20 th centuries. These historiographical tendencies show very cleary the necessity of analysing the problem of the elites formal education under the view of the education’s social dimension, trying to evaluate the impacte of schooling’s trajectories in the social and economical dynamics. So, it will be in this perspective that i’ll support the empirical results, wich will be introduced. I will argue the secondary scools is a privilileged space of elites training and in which I establish the relative adptation of the teaching offered to the different kinds of professional and social perfomances that were demanded to the studentes who finished the secondary education.