The Experimental Classes: Different Secondary Education in Brazil in 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to understand the normative prescription and experimental secondary school implantations in Brazil in the late 1950s, and the developments in the decade that followed. Thus, attempts to shed light on the political and educational conditions that enabled the Ministry of Education and Culture to bring in legislation that allowed the implementation of the so-called experimental secondary-school classes. This paper also focuses on the pedagogical practices in these experimental classes, taking into account that most of them were appropriated from French pedagogical models – the classes nouvelles in public schools and personalized and communitarian pedagogy in Catholic schools. It uses the circulation and appropriation concepts, understood from the perspective of the historian Roger Chartier, who considers that cultural goods circulate and are used in different ways, so that the reception is held with creativity through resistance, resignification and arrangements. This historiographical perspective is adopted in the educational field to acquire the pedagogical circulation and appropriation model operations. This documental corpus of this historical investigation is made up of written documents from French educational institutions – the Centre International d`Études Pédagogiques, located in Sèvres, and the Centre d`Études Pédagogiques de Paris – and the archives of university institutions and Brazilian school collections. This paper analyses the Ministry of Education’s legislation on the experimental classes (1958) and the uses of French pedagogical models in the public system and Catholic schools.