Why Montessori Education Did Not Take Root in Portugal—or Did It? Selective Reception, Curricular Convergence, and Pedagogical Invisibility

Montessori education has circulated transnationally for more than a century, yet its institutional consolidation has varied markedly across national contexts. Portugal offers a revealing case: Montessori ideas entered pedagogical debate during the First Republic, appearing in legislation and local initiatives, but they did not stabilize as a continuous public or professional infrastructure. This qualitative historical-policy document study examines how Montessori pedagogy was received and translated in Portugal, which institutional conditions constrained consolidation, and how Montessori-compatible principles relate to the 1997 and 2016 versions of Orientações Curriculares para a Educação Pré-Escolar (OCEPE) [Curriculum Guidelines for Pre-Primary Education]. The study combines direct analysis of Alberty’s 1918 report and the two OCEPE editions with a source-based synthesis of Portuguese educational historiography. Educational transfer, policy translation, and institutional theory guide explicit criteria for historical visibility, institutional recognition, and curricular convergence. Pedagogical invisibility is refined as a provisional heuristic for a bounded configuration: documented reception, discontinuous institutional anchoring, and later conceptual compatibility without explicit genealogical attribution. The construct is distinguished from Bernstein’s invisible pedagogy, and curricular similarity is not treated as evidence of direct transmission. Portugal illustrates how a pedagogical tradition may remain historically legible while becoming institutionally and genealogically opaque.