Um Bello Horizonte para o projeto educacional batista: o Collegio Baptista Americano Mineiro e a disputa pela oferta da educação privada na cidade (1918-1929)

Abstract

In Minas Gerais, the Baptist educational initiative took place in the year of 1897, even before the inauguration of Minas New Capital. However, it was only in the early 1920s that the school became relatively important after purchasing the sumptuous terrain in the Floresta district, a suburban area of the city of Belo Horizonte. The present work aims at understanding the implementation process of the Collegio Baptista Americano Mineiro (1920) from the work of American missionaries, analyzing the relations in the struggle for the offer of private education with a focus on the tensions in the city of Belo Horizonte, which happened between the Baptist school and the citys other catholic, confessional institutions. At the same time, one sought to understand the Baptist schools relation with the spatial and urban plan of Minas Gerais capital. The time frame is delimited from the year of the founding of the attached Baptist school of Belo Horizonte in 1918 until 1929, the year of change in state law from the Law number 1,092 (10/12/1929), which transformed the precarious commitment to religious education in school groups in a legal instrument. It is understood that this law represented the "crowning" of the ideological and political struggles waged by Catholic intellectuals in different institutional channels throughout the 1920s, including the newspaper "O Horizonte". In this sense, the new legislation emphasized the imbalance of forces in the struggle for the private educational field between Catholics and Protestants in the period of the First Republic in Minas Gerais, paradoxically marked by the jurisprudence of secularism. In order to reach such objectives, the Baptist and Catholic confessional periodicals were used as a privileged research instrument for the construction of knowledge in the history of education. From the analysis of the discourses about the positions of the respective editorials before the debate on educational policy and legislation, it was possible to analyze the moment when these protagonists asserted themselves as public opinion and took a stand before the issue of the republican laicism and their respective educational projects proposed to part of the population of Belo Horizonte and Minas Gerais.