Concepções de avaliação e seleção nos anos vinte e trinta: a educação brasileira e a formação das elites

Abstract

The present paper considers analyzing conceptions of school evaluation that have been introduced in Brazilian education in the beginning of the century XX, through the movement "Pioneers of the new education". Our theoretical referencial is Antonio Gramsci's reflections about the school, the State, the civil society, the intellectuals, hegemony and passive revolution. We assume that the Pioneers acted in the Brazilian civil society as intellectual that expressed in the pedagogical field, interests of the rising industrial bourgeoisie. They supported an ambiguous speech on expansion and restriction in the school. On one side, they defended the expansion of the school for the work social class, but, on the other side, they limited them to have access to superior education and the formation of "leaders". The accomplishment of the contradictory process of school democratization and exclusion had as basic premise the evaluation method, introduced by the Pioneers. Our thesis is that the widening of the bases of social election to compose the intellectual and leading staff represented a strategy so to maintain the bourgeoisies intellectual direction and politics over the working class.