This article investigates the theme of regeneration of minors to focus on the meaning given to education, at the end of the 19th century, when its scientific approach acquired indisputable social relevance. During the 19th century, the work of regeneration of minors in houses of correction sought to separate minors from adults. The purpose was to avoid the moral contagion by the suggestion of adult pervert morally. In the 1870, the theorists concerned with high rates of criminal recidivism proposed alternatives to the current model. One of the ideas was the creation of preventive disciplinary institutes for abandoned minors, the intention was to turn smaller perverts by heredity and the environment, but who had not committed crimes, in healthy adults and useful to themselves and to the motherland. The proposal was based on the confinement of minors in disciplinary institutes for many years – from childhood to adulthood – in order to subject them to a rigorous treatment of moral education and vocational and primary education. The preventive model spread quickly and found many supporters, as the Portuguese educator António Manuel Ferreira Deusdado (1858-1918). Ferreira Deusdado, as he was known, was an intellectual with varied interests, among them, the juvenile correctional education, having been the Portuguese delegate in important events in this area in the 1890, the study of Thomistic philosophy, the organisation of teaching of geography, the provision of secondary and higher education and the establishment of the area of applied psychology to education. He was also one of the founders and directors of Revista de Educação e Ensino (1886-1900), dedicated to the Lisbon teaching staff. In this journal, he circulated his ideas about the importance of moral education as a means of correcting the pervert instincts that would lead to the criminal. He was still a severe critic of the idea of the “criminal nato”, theoretical basis of Lombroso school. For the o Portuguese intellectual, the delinquent corrigibility normal – abnormal excluded – was possible if from na early age the learner was subjected to an education geared to the formation of habit. The educational purpose was to drive the man to the state of perfection, from the state of nature. The methodology used was the documental analysis of the sources consulted in the National Library of Portugal and in the Geographical Society of Lisbon, in particular, articles published in editions of the Revista de Educação e Ensino, as well as some of his major books. The French cultural history was the theoretical contribution to substantiate this research, in particular the contributions of Chartier (1990; 2002) and Sirinelli (2003). In this article, I propose to locate bottlenecks faced by Ferreira Deusdado in formulating its educational proposal, which in spite of its limits craved emancipate the free men of the social and genetic defects that degenerated.