A Different Canon?: Education and the Economic System in the work of Rodrigues de Freitas (1840-1896)

• Autor(a) principal: Teixeira,Pedro
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1645-64322015000100004
• topic: Education; Portugal; Human Capital; Political Economy; Rodrigues de Freitas

Since the emergence of human capital theory in the late 1950s and the subsequent development of the economics of education, there has been some interest and debate about the historical roots of the economic analysis of education. There is a consensus that, until the mid-twentieth century, most economists paid little attention to the economic analysis of education. In this paper will be analyzed the work of José Joaquim Rodrigues de Freitas (24.1.1840-27.7.1896), one of the most influential Portuguese intellectuals and politicians of the second half of the nineteenth century. He devoted a large part of his work on Political Economy to the analysis of educational issues and regarded the latter as having major economic and social consequences. We will discuss the interest and originality of his work in the way he linked several aspects of the economic system to his educational reflections.