The ‘Two Cultures’ in Nineteenth-Century Portugal: Scholarship v. Science in Higher Education

In the nineteenth century, the Portuguese intelligentsia addressed one of the issues that confronted them with other European countries: the need to face the challenges of industrialisation through educational reform. This paper focuses on the main issue of university reform at a time when the only university in the country, Coimbra, showed signs of excessive conservatism both in its syllabus and teaching methods, and was confronted with new proposals for the introduction of technological disciplines or the creation of polytechnical schools. A parallel will also be drawn with the ongoing debate on the same subject in England.