A rádio sociedade e a educação para Roquette-Pinto

Abstract

Having as object of this study Roquette-Pinto´s initiatives to educate the Brazilian public through the Rádio Sociedade (Radio Society), this research has proposed to answer how education was seen by Roquette Pinto. The first chapter addressed the context of education and science in Brazil. The second chapter dealt with the influences on Roquette-Pinto´s work, his social concerns and beliefs in broadcasting. The third chapter, and the central one, brought in his experiences in the Rádio Sociedade (Radio Society), his expectations related to the promotion of Brazilian people education, seeking to portray his public and the attempts to provide people with education. To that end this work used the epistolography, analyzing 700 images available in the Radio Society´s website in the internet, which was produced by the team of the Casa da Ciência/ Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, - FIOCRUZ. These images represent letters, telegrams, official documents, meeting minutes, programmes, announcements sent and received by Roquette Pinto. We asked the questions as long as the documents offered relevant clues about our object. Questions were made about: Whom this public was, How the Radio society worked, How the relationship with the listeners was, What the context was and What ideas were being discussed. Many answers were complemented and certified with the help of the existing information found in some editions of the magazines published by the Radio Sociedade, such as the Electron and Radio, some newspaper clippings from that time, also available in the site. Some bibliographic material, comments from other people, researches about institutions and people from the first half of the XX th century, institutional documents and some copies of the Revista Nacional de Educação, referring to 1932 and 1933, were also used. The work sought to show how Roquette-Pinto´s ideal of providing education for the Brazilian people was being built, and the Radio Sociedade representativeness in this context, which under a view of improving communication media and culturally integrate the isolated populations, sick people and those with low education level in the country, has been created as the main tool for educating people. Thus the first educational radio was born in Brazil, in 1923, as a fast, low cost and simple way to bring culture, information, the elementary practical teaching and civism to a population with no contact with the living culture of the urbanized capital cities. Among the matters that the Radio Sociedade would try to strengthen there was the scientific education, the relationship between hygiene, health and morals and national identity. It was through the Radio Sociedade that to educate passed by the dissemination of science and technology, but also by the dissemination of popular and classical music, arts, literature, news broadcast and children´s stories. There was a constant concern in contributing for the strengthening of the Brazilian people´s nationality feeling. It was realized then that Roquette Pinto was not talking about an education oriented just by the school curricula or by the scientific products. With this research it was found that he talked about an education promoted as basic. However, the meaning of basic for him and his public often differs, requiring a constant negotiation about the proposal of education