This book is a relevant work that makes significant contributions to the knowledge of the history of education in Costa Rica. The author makes a rereading of the main events treated so far by other historians in this field and proposes a set of unpublished and controversial interpretative theses that enrich the national debate. Among them, the following stand out: education was not a forge of democracy, on the contrary, it was the economic, social and institutional conditions that favored democratization that led to the expansion of education, driven, in large part, by the efforts of the urban and rural communities for more public schools; After 1950, the efforts to achieve greater coverage in secondary school and to make education a mechanism of social mobility, failed to improve quality. Finally, says the author, the 1980s was a lost decade after which the development of the Costa Rican educational system has been increasingly conditioned by the demands of the labor market.