Eventos Académicos, 39 ISCHE. Educación y emancipación

Tamaño de fuente: 
Education Inspection and School times in the Brazilian Empire (1850-1889)
Vinicius Teixeira Santos

Última modificación: 2017-07-17

Resumen


This investigation aims at analyzing the education inspection in the second half of the 19th century, especially what it tells us about the school attendance, constantly registered concerns through the official documents of that time. The attendance control was a way for the provincial leading authorities to establish a specific temporality for the lower classes’ instructions. Moreover, it was the manner they had made up to try to legitimate a particular space (schools) and a school calendar (class time, recess time, holidays, final exams dates, etc.) at a time when schooling was a project full of tensions, conflicts and adaptations with other spaces and social times (from work, home, church). In this respect, this research mainly aims at investigating the Education inspection interconnected to the political and educational interests of the Brazilian imperial society, notably of its leading elites. This is a historical documental study which researched sources were part of the Education Regulations, annual reports of the Province’s presidency and the Education board reports, from 1850 to 1889. The study also addresses former studies which are mentioned in the literature review as studies about similar topics. The existence of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Education inspection in the schools throughout the Brazilian Empire indicates that this was a common theme in the documental sources from the nineteenth century and would permeate the authorities and governments back in that century. Among the results, it is confirmed that the primary school education would be a priority for the provincial authorities and would be applied to the public schools, which were attended by the lower classes. The latter were considered as dangerous and were to be disciplined and educated according to the elites and authorities’ interests for those who had political and administration state positions. In this regard, they were repeating the pattern built up during the colonizing process, mainly in respect of the control of those specific population segments stemmed from captivity: freed slaves. This also practiced in the pauper population from Brazil in its whole. For this purpose, the attendance control (time) was the main aspect to be considered by the Education inspectors who, during the provincial school visit, would check, among other things, the enrolment, the grade point average of those who would thoroughly attend school, the arrival time, the recesses, the leaving time and the final exams. This whole process aimed at seizing a part of the lower classes’ time in order to discipline and educate them according to the political, social, economic and hegemonic religious interests of the conservative groups. In this respect, one can emphasize the fact that, throughout the Empire, those actions were embedded in the colonizing projects, inspecting from an early age the curriculum, the routines, and, on a special aspect, the time allocated to the Brazilian public Education of the 19th century.