History of Brazilian Urban Education: Space and Time in Primary Schools

Abstract

W. T. Pink and G. W. Noblit (Eds.), International Handbook of Urban Education, 581–600. © 2007 Springer. Our purpose is to sketch the process of the institutionalization of primary schooling in Brazil. We will focus on the historical constitution of school times and spaces, under the assumption that together times and spaces play a major part in the social and school orders. They are always personal and institutional, individual and collective, and the effort to circumscribe them, control them, materialize them in charts of years/series, schedules, clocks, sirens, or in specific rooms, schoolyards, individual or double desks, must be understood as a movement that has had or has proposed multiple trajectories for the production of the school. Hence it’s educative strength and it’s centrality in the school apparatus. The organization of this chapter around three topics – home schools, monument schools, and functional schools – explores the three main moments in the history of primary education in Brazil. These are examined from the viewpoint of the physicalarchitectural place occupied by the school, as well as by the multiple temporalities experienced in it, and seen from the perspective of the pedagogical innovations and education reforms. Although we will examine some of the aspects of rural schools, our focus is on the urban schools as most of the changes occurred in the capital cities. This analysis also touches upon the material and methodological changes introduced by the reforms as part of their strategies of pedagogical renovation. They indicate the response to social problems in the establishment of a hegemonic school model throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here the focus was to civilize the nation in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, and to nationalize the foreign, with their origins in immigration (subsidized or not): this often involved the confrontation between a school (and state) government and a home government. The changes processed in school contents in the last 200 years can be understood in the same manner. The modifications effected in what we now call syllabi and curricula were also intimately related to the challenges faced by the affirmation of the modern school form, both in what it required in terms of production of new social practices, and in what it meant in terms of revising the pedagogical principles governing the exchanges between the school world and the social world. 31