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This work is concerned to an ongoing research that aims to give a historical perspective to the development and persistence of a pedagogical ethos (Geertz, 2013) that attributes to children themselves the responsibility for their school difficulties, in terms of their organic, psychical, familiar or social conditions and gives less weight to the contributions of schools or educational system as far as those difficulties are concerned. The years from 1920 to 1960 were a period when different theories, with a variety of foundations (biological, psychological, psychoanalytic and sociological foundations) intended to explain school failure. Coming from USA and Europe, those theories circulated in Brazil and probably contributed to that pedagogical ethos. The documental source of this research is a journal named Revista de Educação, published in the State of São Paulo from the late 1920s until 1961, although with a few interruptions and changes of its name. The teaching journals were meaningful vehicles to disseminate educational ideas, especially in São Paulo, in the early 20th century, when there was not a great profusion of educational works. As historical sources, the journals allow to identify different voices, projects, wishes and realities of the various actors involved in the educational questions (CARVALHO, 1998; CATANI, 1989). Under such a perspective, this ongoing research analyses the journal’s numbers published from the end of 1931 until 1961. The numbers published between 1930 and 1931 were already studied by Gualtieri (2013) who revealed that, in those years, the journal published articles which disseminated principles, norms and prescriptions in order to establish behaviors, ways to understand schools and teaching practices as parts of the "emerging national pedagogical culture ". According to Gualtieri (2013), pedagogical ideology imposed the abandonment of intuition and in its place the use of scientific knowledge, psychological and pedagogical tests, considered useful to organize selective and homogeneous classes. The child's blame had, therefore, scientific support. In this paper, it will be discussed data referring only to the period from 1931 to 1937, a turning point in Brazilian politics started with the Getúlio Vargas’ dictatorship with repercussions on educational policies. Preliminary results revealed that children themselves and their personal history still answer for school failure mainly based on psychoanalytic explanations.