This paper aims to discuss the thinking of Barbosa de Godóis on Brazilian education and especially on Maranhão in the early years of the republican period. Barbosa de Godóis had a strong influence in public education in the State of Maranhão as a teacher, politician and, mainly, as a thinker of education in the sense of organizing and managing the Normal School and the Model School and School Groups and author of school books (Rudimentary Writing and History of Maranhão), as inspector of public education or in defense of the education of the deprived population of the State in the tribune of the Legislative Assembly as State Representative and in the periodic press in articles in which he advocated on varied subjects related to public education, such as Education of women and blacks, the need for education for the rural worker, industry and commerce. He believed that through education the individual could reach all social and political spaces. His discourses on education are represented in newspapers and in books in which he devoted himself to discussing the "foundations of education" (as his writings so dominated). In this work, we will focus the analysis on the following works: Civic Instruction (1900), Master of the School (1914), Pedagogical Hygiene (1914) and the Ramos da Educação(1914) for being the main sources where his ideas of man, Society, and education are present and in the articles published in the Diário do Maranhão. Therefore, understanding the thinking of this author is a way of understanding the process of constitution of the field of education in Brazil in the early years of the Republic and the way of production and circulation of ideas that were present throughout the national territory from Europe, The United States, and some Latin American countries, such as Argentina, where Domingo Sarmiento's ideas appear very often in the journalistic writings of Barbosa de Godóis.