Geografia escolar oficial: os currículos do Colégio Pedro II para o ensino secundário e a construção da vulgata (1838-1940)

Abstract

The thesis that will be presented has, as its central theme, the History of School Geography in Brazil, understood as a field of research historically related and intertwined with the field of History of Geographical Thought and Geography itself. However, it has its own specificities, relationships, and theoretical-methodological connections. In behalf of its specificities, to write, it was necessary to look for the theoretical groundwork from the History of School Subjects (Chervel, 1990), the History of Education (Faria Filho, 1998) and the Theory and Social History of Curriculum (Goodson, 1995). Based on Audigier (1992) and Lestegás (2002), one can consider that School Geography is not only a simplified remodelling of Academic Geography: it has its own distinct purposes, methodologies, practices, and knowledge production. On this wise, the issue of the Vulgate became essential to understanding the constitution of School Geography in Brazil, from the 19th century up to the 1930s, highlighting its movement - being contradictory and complementary. The official Curriculum presented by the State Educational Legislation for schooling is what Goodson (1995) calls a “script” for schooling and school subjects - as within the curricular scope debates and disputes intensify and reveal themselves, in a game of strength and diverse influences - which is why it was chosen as a documentary source. The power of analysing the official curriculum lies in its characteristics as a State tool for centralizing and standardizing culture. Furthermore, the facts that reveal this power hold their limitations, the distance between prescription and practice in the classroom. In order to answer the questions, the focus is on both direct legislation and infra-legislation (Faria Filho, 1998). In order to read and analyse legislation and official curricula from this perspective, some procedures were needed, such as contextualization, theoretical categories, and cross-referencing with other textual sources, recorded in periodicals, magazines, and books. In this approach, it was considered the relationship between the schooling process, the general purposes of education, and the specific purposes of the subjects; the relationship between the constitution of school knowledge and pedagogical methods; stability factors, such as inspection and teaching training and career; instability, social and political contexts; and the relationship with its academic matrix. Notwithstanding, the other element to be used as a “marker” of these shifts and immutabilities in School Geography was still missing: the School Geographic Knowledge itself, its contents, and its Vulgate. Chronologically following the legislation and official curricula has allowed us to understand the context in which the debates emerged, their implications and conflicts, and enabled us to uncover the construction of the Vulgate of school geography, the moments of instability, and its stability.