The belief in the moral and intellectual inferiority of poor children in Portugal: a turning point

In Portugal, the fight against proverty in childhood was considered essential not only to combat “social ills”, and consider new hygienist precepts, but as a defence, a concept of race improvement. The moralization of the poor from childhood was then imposed a State responsibility which forced to create social and hygienic educational assistance institutions based on scientific and pedagogical concepts which did not escape Darwinist and eugenic influences. The then dominant adopted the same corrective pedagogy as responses focused on the field of moral and therapeutic education to curb childhood poverty, mainly when of their shortcomings were social and environmental. This study aims to explain the urgent social policy and trajectory to tackle poverty in childhood, invoking the central role of policymakers receive ideas, science, and knowledge produced about childhood during the First Republic in Portugal. Specifically, the aim here is to highlight the social, political, and cultural context of the urgent Child Protection Law of May 27, 1911. We intend to establish convergences or divergences between the theoretical influences of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism and the opportunity to create a Law that is still considered significant and a historic landmark in terms of children’s rights and protection.