In 1961 the OECD launched a programme for the development of the education systems of the traditionally backward countries of Southern Europe: Portugal, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey, to which Spain was added a year later. The project openly included the educational sphere in international economic development assistance programmes. Some authors maintain that it was the first time that an international organisation had undertaken such a project (Escalonilla, 133). The Mediterranean Regional Project is a paradigmatic example of the type of intervention by international organisations in peripheral countries. This intervention was based on a set of theoretical assumptions, advocated a new methodology and was accompanied by a new language, which was claimed to be universally applicable. It was therefore based on a framework that Jones referred to in 2006 as the Global Architecture of Education. The first aim of this paper is to characterise this Global Architecture of Education in the 1960s. At that time, its theoretical assumptions were determined by functionalist theories that established a direct relationship between investment in education and economic growth. Education was thus seen as a prerequisite for development. In the methodological field, planning with all its statistical apparatus was the modernising novelty. Alongside this, a new discourse on education developed, a semantics of modernisation (Schriewer, 1996) which replaced the traditional ideological educational debate by the rule of the "experts", an apolitical educational technocracy aimed at development. This technocratic perspective is particularly relevant in this case, as the project included two para-fascist dictatorships reminiscent of another era in history, Portugal and Spain, a democracy like Italy, a communist country like Yugoslavia, and two authoritarian countries like Turkey and Greece. “Modernisation" seemed to make up for these very different ideological and political positions. The second objective is to analyse how the programme was implemented in the countries concerned. This analysis will focus on secondary education, which was one of the main objectives of the programme insofar as this area was one of the weakest points of education in these countries. The aim is to study from a comparative perspective the situation of secondary education in each country, the objectives set and the extent to which they have been achieved. This will be done mainly through the publications produced by the programme itself. Finally, the parallelisms of this project with the programmes developed for Latin America will be briefly pointed out (Ossenbach & Martínez, 2011).

In a context in which segmentation was a dominant factor in the architecture of educational policies of the authoritarian regime of the Estado Novo (1926-1974), the so-called reform of Veiga Simão (Minister of National Education from 1970 to 1974 – see Simão, 1971 and 1972) was guided by a principle of greater systematization (Müller et al., 1987), which had as its basic ideas the “expansion, individualization and diversification of teaching; coherence of access tracks to successive degrees, permeability and interrelationship in secondary education; guarantee of the formative content of teaching and its correlation with social functions” (MEN: 1973). From an organizational point of view, the reform of the educational system approved in 1973 (Law nº 5/73, of 25 July) adopted several principles that had been under study since the 1960s (Machado, 1966; MEN, 1966-1973; Telles, 1964, 1968 and 1969), of which we highlight: the expansion of compulsory education from 6 to 8 years; the increase in non-higher education from 11 to 12 degrees (4+4+4 plan – primary+preparatory+secondary schooling); the adoption of the principle of a unified multicurricular study plan for the general course in secondary schools (2 years) and multipurpose or specific schools for the complementary course (2 years). In this new school framework, it is necessary to question what was meant by secondary education before and within the reform. Although the reform was only regulated and continued during the democratic period (after the 25th April Revolution or Carnation Revolution, in 1974) at the level of the bases defined for higher education (creation of new universities, polytechnic institutes and normal schools higher education), it is essential here to analyze the novelty contained in post-primary studies. This communication aims to analyze the principles foreseen by the Veiga Simão reform for secondary education in the light of the organizational tradition implemented since Jaime Moniz (1894-1895), on the one hand, and the debates and studies that at the time circulated, at an international level, by other. This paper’s findings were drawn upon reports provided by international agencies, such as UNESCO (1963, 1968 and 1982), Bureau International d'Éducation (1970, 1972; and Pauli & Bremer, 1971), OECD (1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1974, 1975) and the Council of Europe (1970), as well by scholar studies carried out in Portugal (see Candeias, 2009; Fernandes et al., 2018; Fernandes, 1967 and 1981; Grácio, 1981; Grácio, 1986 and 1998; Lemos, 2014; Nóvoa, 1992; Nunes, s/d.; Planchard, 1978; Stoer, 1986; Teodoro, 2001 and 2023, among others). This paper will present a framework, both national and international, which takes as a reference some of the topics under debate at the time related to secondary education: financing/return on investment in education; planning and management of the system; the social and curricular relationship between the classical and technical-professional tracks; schooling “waste” (or retentiveness); the quality and innovation of teaching; and teacher training.

This paper aims to analyse the development of Argentine secondary education during a time of expansion and intense change. Indeed, between 1950 and 1960, the general enrollment in secondary education expanded by 76.65%, going from 317,551 students to 560,961 students (Acosta, 2023). To do so, the paper locates the national trends concerning international changes towards secondary education, particularly in Western countries. The postwar reconstruction in Europe included the expansion of secondary education. The proposals for change in secondary education took place in a tension between the continuity of the selective nature of the provision and the extension of these types of studies to the entire population. The growing influence of the United States in international organisations such as the United Nations, consolidating in this period, constituted a promising framework for disseminating educational principles of American roots, such as educational equity or the expansion of education through High Schools. The historical transformation of secondary education in Europe involved at least three interrelated changes: i) the extension of the functions of the secondary school; ii) the establishment of new selection mechanisms or the discontinuity of existing ones to facilitate the transition between primary and secondary; iii) the development of diversified study programs differentiated curricular offerings, and/or types of schools according to the interests and needs of the growing educational population (Benavot, Renik and Corrales, 2006). This process adopted a different pace in European countries concerning economic development and the previous extension of secondary education. International organisations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) increasingly promoted changes. In the case of the southern European countries, the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) launched the Mediterranean Regional Project in 1961 to foster educational development and transformation in secondary education. This program extended to Latin American countries such as Argentina and Colombia (Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, 2022; Fernández Lamarra, 2023). In this scenario, the paper seeks to i) describe the ideas circulating in the production of international organisations concerning the expansion of secondary education; ii) characterise the proposals for the reorganisation of this level of education related to the predominant trends of change at the time; iii) describe the extent and form of expansion of secondary education in Argentina related to the international trends. The paper argues that the ideas circulating about changes in secondary education oscillated in a tension between the search to move towards more integrated structures that would mitigate the elitist and selective origin of secondary education and the proposals to extend technical education, in line with the agenda of educational developmentalism promoted by the international organisations. The paper considers primary and secondary sources. The former are national official statistical reports and documents from UNESCO and OECD connected to secondary education. The latter considers previous publications on the subject.