Nature and Education of the Senses

Forging New Sensibilities Within Education for All (Brazil and Spain, in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries)

Abstract

In the wake of the plural movement which intended to renew education in the last decades of nineteenth century and the early twentieth century clues to prescriptions were found which intended to have a universal character. Some educational approaches were very impactful in different countries, such as, aesthetic education, education by experience, education for peace, physical education, besides an occasionally generic return to nature, which aimed at strengthening what we call an education of the senses. Based on clues encountered in Brazilian and Spanish archives, this article deals only with one of its expressions, here called “return to nature”, considering that an education of the senses has aroused and still arouses numerous possibilities of thinking about an individual’s formation processes, those of which are sometimes directly related to what today we define as leisure, which often feeds the myth of a return to a supposedly pristine nature.