A ideia de universidade moderna no Brasil: notas sobre história e historiografia

Abstract

This article aims to review the historical dynamics about the construction of the idea of a modern university in Brazil, built during the 1920s and 1930, as well as identify the emergence of an historiographic interpretations that consolidated a univocal direction for this process. For this, we based it on theoretical and methodological references from the history of education, the history of historiography and the history of concepts and on analysis the intellectual debates promoted by the Brazilian Education Association (ABE). We identified a wide variety of philosophical and pedagogical concepts about how Brazilian higher education should be organized. Then, we confront these conceptions with the representations that the historiography of education made of them, starting in the 1970s. Our conclusion was that this historiography assimilated a timeless idea of university, devoid of all historicity, which compromised the understanding of those debates.