A lecture on the genesis of the modern western school

Abstract

In more than thirty years of teaching, few students have had the privilege of learning from Carlota Boto. The work The School Liturgy in the Modern Age appears as a generous extension of this opportunity to all who get entangled in its lines. It is effectively a class on the building of the modern school by artisans of that time: authors and actors who spoke and acted to draw the contours of a new school model, aligned with the civilizing project and the demands of its time. I understand this book as a happy narrative effort, in which the author attributes meaning not only to the phenomenon she intends to study, but also to her personal career as a teacher who masterfully invents classes by drawing theses. As one of the people who sat in desks to listen to her, I joyfully recognize the itineraries of some of her disciplines, now systematized to allow us to know them with a depth and rigor inaccessible to our notebook notes. For his students, reading represents the nostalgia of a conversation, with the unique possibility of returning with more maturity to those discussions, revealing previously unnoticed elements. For new readers, it is a chance to appropriate part of the author's comprehensive and sophisticated repertoire. For both, it is an exercise to know the school through historical conditions of its existence, under the lens of its clipping.