She was the initiator of a movement for coeducation as a method based on the recognition of equality between men and women. Also, she was one of the first women concerned about children’s rights.
Schools with progressive methodologies
. Manso complained that in Argentina the teaching profession was exercised in a humiliating fashion. Because of that, she sent to the Legislature of the Province of Buenos Aires a bill for an Organic Law for Common Education in which she asked for professionalism, appropriate salaries with periodic increases, and so on.
She proposed educating children in keeping with their nature. To do so, she proposed dividing childhood into four periods: the first, attention and observation; the second, attention and comparison; the third period for exercising memory; and the last one for applying the imagination.
Maria Montessori once said ’teaching through the paths of joy and love makes learning enjoyable.’ Juana did believe in that saying and she also, as Montessori did, encouraged teaching through play.
She was buried in the English cemetery. Friar Junior proposed the following epitaph: ‘Here lies an Argentine woman who, in the midst of the night of indifference that enveloped the country, preferred to be buried among foreigners rather than defile the sanctuary of her conscience