Educação, liberalismo e modernidade em Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos (1795-1850)

Abstract

Land private property has been the core of our political constitution. It would be the only Brazilian social distinction in the 19th century. Education would support it and would be the way to select the State’s civil servants. Brazilian State was created as a tropical Empire that would consecrate liberal modernity at the beginning of the 19th century. The State would oppose all that the manor class considered republican anarchy in Hispanic America’s remaining countries. The Constitution and the Parliament were utterly working, the market and the press were free, the monarchy was steady and centralized. Then, Brazilian Empire would endure this century under apparent modernity socially and institutionally. Our goal is to investigate the State’s formation through the proposals and investments in people’s education. That resulted from a society that aspired to be modern and liberal and should justify its productive model based on slavery. Thus, we seek to draw a Brazilian sociocultural overview in the first half of the 19th century. To do so, we investigate from the “Morellian methods” to the speech analysis and from cultural history to political history. We try to notice this Brazilian society, listen to it, and understand its educational project, from primary education to university. Hence, we aim to understand a political man - based on the character of Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos - from that society that was being constructed. He reflected the manor class’s interests on his projects of State and Nation by projecting laws and institutions, promoting the province, the Empire, and the Nation. That was a liberal contradiction: an institutionally modern Empire coexisting with a pro-slavery society. As a background, we realize the attempt to merge ethnic and culturally diverse peoples into a homogenous Brazilian Nation. Moreover, it would be based on the Portuguese language, catholic religion, and liberal order. From that, there would be a liberal-utilitarian society, under a minimum State regarding people’s assistance. Then, the State chose not to widen education, turning it into a criterium to be considered a citizen. This way, we realize another contradiction of the Brazilian liberal-utilitarian speech: by supporting the education discourse, it would split society into Nation and people. That would exclude all other people who could not be given the right to be citizens of the Empire.