The Pedagogical Museum in Argentina: birth and vicissitudes of a renovating Institution (1883-1940)

Abstract

Pedagogical museums emerged from the mid-nineteenth century accompanying the training of teachers and the construction of national educational systems. They were centers that included a library with educational works, legislation and other types of documents, as well as school furniture and collections of teaching materials. They subscribed to the circulation of ideas, practices and school materials. They had a prospective and instituting character of the new methodologies, tools, politics and school structure, and the express intention of constructing national identities. In Argentina, the initiative to create a pedagogical museum within the scope of the National Education Council, the National School Museum, attached to the library and aimed at primary education, was understood as a motor for the pedagogical-political and material renewal of the education. The museum was one of the state mechanisms within the educational system to gradually bring society to a level of “civilization”.