This article presents a historical approach to the statistics discipline in the pedagogy course at Universidade de São Paulo - USP (1939-1999). The aim was to investigate the origins of the discipline, its content, methods and role in the training of pedagogues. Document analysis and oral history were used as methodological resources. Based on the history of the curriculum, the research dialogued especially with the central ideas of Ivor Goodson, understanding the curriculum as a social construct and investigating how and why certain knowledge is (or is not) taught in a particular historical context. It was found that the statistics discipline was considered very important for the education field in the first half of the twentieth century, since it contributed to the production of diagnoses for the planning of public policy, to the work of school inspection and the classification of students. Originating in undergraduate school management courses of Instituto de Educação, Universidade de São Paulo in the 1930s, the statistics discipline gained ground in the pedagogy course, created in 1939, remained in the curriculum, although it underwent several curricular changes. Since the 1980s, it began to suffer limitations in the educational field, due to the focus of educational research, which gradually lost its quantitative nature, or due to the redefining of the pedagogy course, which started advocating for teaching as the basis for the training of pedagogues.
Pedagogy course; Teaching of statistics; History of Education; History of the curriculum