This work analyses some reform initiatives of primary schooling in the state of Paraná, Brazil, which occurred between 1901 to 1921. Connected to the debates about social and cultural modernization, that set of reform initiatives carried the expectations surrounding the construction of a project of elementary popular schooling and to the renewal of teaching, of school and its processes and practices. We dialogued in two fronts: with the historiography which analyses the reforms that took place in Brazil during the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the 20th century; and with the production about educational reforms in other places of the word (especially Italy, Spain, and Argentina). The work intends to reflect about the place and the meanings of the educational reforms. For that, it proposes a theoretical and methodological operation that tries to analyze educational reforms by looking at how they behave within the curriculum. In this sense, we highlight the large number of curricular documents which were produced in Paraná primary schooling during the first two decades of the 20th century. The temporal limits in this work are given by two of those documents: 1901 is the year that an important document, which promoted the first reform initiatives, took effect, while in the year 1921 was published a document that, because to its characteristics, can be interpreted as an arrival point to those reform initiatives. Inspired by the perspective proposed by Ivor Goodson (1995, 1997, 2001), favorable to production of a social history of the curriculum, this investigation questions: the established curricular dynamics, aiming to understand how the curricular documents were impacted and organized the theoretical matrices that shaped the educational area in that moment; and how they articulated this with the demands to solve the issues that came with of schooling, in a scenario full of attempts to reform the school. Methodologically based by the way Raymond Williams (20017) operates with “key-words”, we analyzed the way dynamics established by curricular texts seized, processed, and proposed practical solutions for three notions that were frequent and relevant in the educational debates, and became structuring principles of the curriculum in that time interval: activity, discipline and utility. In order to capture the selective function of school curriculum in terms of social and cultural demands and priorities, the curricular documents were confronted with the voices, demands and subjects interested in participating in reform initiatives of Paraná primary school on the one hand, and on the other hand with the appropriation experiences by those who are the main target of the curricular texts: the teachers. The results reveal that the curriculum cannot be simply deduced by the announced reformers intentions and that a curricular approach provides elements of a historic temporality very singular that help to interrogate and understand the educational reforms behavior.