O processo de escolarização e o ensino de primeiras letras em MinasGerais (1825-1852)

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating the schooling process in the State of Minas Gerais betwwen the years of 1825 and 1852 foccusing on the elementary school. The period this paper has undertaken to study can be characterized by the keen debates pertainning to the necessity to educate the poor population and the importance of organizing public teaching. We took the care to relate to such debates the building of the National State, the mechanisms to guarantee the order, and the civilization of the heterogeneous Brazilian people. Thus, we highlight the participation of both intellectuals and politicians in the organization of the teaching of grade school through their designing of legal mechanisms and the increase of public schools in the state. We also problematize the limited access to elementary school to the bulk of the population. We examine the implentation of new teaching methods supposed to replace individual teaching, adopting the teaching based on rationality and its relationship with teacher formation. We hightlight the thriving of the concept of schools both as socialing tools and knowledge transmission. We investigate the appropriation tatics emploed by the teachers in regard to methods, as well as describe and analyze their role in the process of institutionalization of the elementary school. We also show that from the experience with the so-called mutual teaching method, a new material for the education process linked to the introduction of new methods was produced. We inventory the school goals of the time and demostrate how the introduction of several new materials both complicated the teaching and interfered in the way the teachers organized the knowledge transmission and also in the time necessary for the students to learn the topics that constituted school education.