Experimental education: Letters from Almeida Garrett to his daughter

Abstract

The text presents and analyses the private letters of João Baptista de Almeida Garrett (1799-1854) sent to his daughter Maria Adelaide, during the period when she was an internal student of the Salésias, between November 1853 and 1854. It is a set of 40 handwritten letters that remained unpublished until the publication of Correspondência Familiar (2012). Although these are private documents of an inviolable nature, when they are authorised for publication they take on historical value by reconstructing situations in the family sphere from an informal perspective rarely made known. In a direct and unpretentious style, the 40 letters are a genuine testimony of paternal love and a record of educational investment in the eighteenth century, not common in Portugal. Hence its significance for the pedagogical-political literature, scarce in domestic correspondence, which adds to the contribution to the understanding of what seems coherent in the Português liberal thought under the influence of romanticism: on the one hand, the correlation between illustration and civility; on the other hand, the unevenness of the demand for education according to gender. Knowing that Garrett wrote the letters 24 years after the publication of the book Da Educação (1829), we wonder about the confirmation of the ideological coherence in the transition from the generalized theoretical plan to the individualized practical plan.