ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the center-periphery relationship, within the scope of the history of education, based on established fixed places for countries and subjects in dichotomous readings between dominant and dominated. Without denying the inequalities that mark the relations between countries and subjects, the methodological procedure consisted of investigating and tracing the nodes and links of human and non-human networks in the process of world diffusion of the modern school in the 19th century. Therefore, the text is organized in two parts. In the first, it deals with the reverse circuit of the school desk and the circulation of an American school desk model, not as a specific product, but as a concept, an idea laden with meanings. In the second, it examines the re-export movement of other school objects, such as materials for teaching natural sciences. As a result, both the displacement of the idea-product and the re-export movement point to the directions and polycentric relationships that marked the worldwide diffusion of the modern school and its materiality.
