School material culture and intellectual history

Abstract

This essay proposes some reflections and suggestions in order to raise the need to rethink the material culture of the school, a field that has been shaping up in recent years as an innovative historiographic trend in the intellectual history of education. Material and intellectual are not opposed, as might be suspected at first sight, since the consideration of materialities as objects and as contents by contemporary historiography, and not only as a source, is due to an operation of cultural history that it has to be carried out from intellectual presumptions. Otherwise, the historical operation would be reduced to a mere ethnographic construction, and therefore it would not transcend the positivist and instrumental orientation of the analysis. The intellectual vision of the material changes the episteme and introduces a new criticism in the material culture