Rites About the Sensitive: The Exams at the Modern School in Barcelona

Abstract

I analyze in the present paper a set of prescriptions regarding the use of exams, which were implemented in the experience of the Modern School at Barcelona (1901-1906), during the first decade of the 20th century. Cited as current ritual among the scholar experiences at the time, even being attributed the character of innovation by education renovator intellectuals, I verify how it took place such procedure in the Modern School based on the analytical orientations of Ivor Goodson about the Social History of Curriculum. For the goals of this research, I mobilize a set of records about the exams extracted from the Boletín de la Escuela Moderna (1901-1906), official body of the aforementioned school. However, several other types of documentation compose the corpus of references for the analysis such as pedagogical magazines, iconography, journals etc. Throughout the analysis, I observe the methods of how the exams were mobilized regarding the formation of infancy, especially, as a procedure capable of educating their sensibilities.