The 19th century was marked by political, economic, social and cultural transformations in different countries. The technical-scientific development based on industrialization and rational thought constituted a substrate for cultural changes that also included education. On the one hand, the Positivist and Empiricist paradigms gave rise to and nurtured racialist conceptions and colonizing actions in relation to peoples considered different from the standard of the white, European and catholic man. On the other hand, the search for a Science of Education has given rise to new ideas, new methods, new pedagogical materials and new institutions for the development of popular education, considered as an indispensable condition for the economic and social progress of the peoples.

In this context, the National Pedagogical Museums were created, among them the Pedagogical Museum of France, still existing, and the Pedagogical Museum of Brazil, of ephemeral life. The intersection of the vestiges, clues and traces left by these two institutions allows us to understand educational and cultural processes based on the imagination and the appropriation of representations, ideas and practices put into action in order to create conditions for the emancipatory processes of the populations involved.

From the empirical data, it was possible to identify the national Museums of Education as an international movement in the 19th century, in which the intellectuals of different nations, especially gathered in the Universal Exhibitions, promoted the circulation of ideas on ways to achieve a scientific education, defended comparative studies on education in several countries and conceived the creation of pedagogical museums as strategic instruments to achieve these objectives, by bringing together in a single space studies, researches, materials Teaching center and to become a training center for students and teachers.

This communication focuses on projects and reports elaborated by Ferdinand Buisson for the establishment of the Pedagogical Museum of France in the year 1879, seeking the crossing with documents and studies on the Brazilian Pedagogium. Studies show that the first inspired the Brazilian intellectuals for the conception and creation of the second. Ideas and practices from a capitalist and industrialized European context that placed the secular, free and public school as the main instrument for the consolidation of the republican nation were transplanted to a tropical country in the process of abolishing slavery and implementing the republican regime as a form of valorization Education.