Rewriting the history of primary education: the centenary of the 1827 Law and the Francisco Campos and Fernando de Azevedo reforms

• Autor(a) principal: Vidal, Diana Gonçalves
• Data de Publicação: 2002
• Outros Autores: Faria Filho, Luciano Mendes de
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Educação e Pesquisa
• Texto Completo: https://www.revistas.usp.br/ep/article/view/27874
• topic: Education reforms; Educational memory; Historiography of education; Reformas educacionais; Memória educacional; Historiografia da educação

This text analyzes the role played by the celebrations of the centenary of the promulgation of the October, 15th 1827 Law within the discussions of the reforms of the Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro education systems that happened in 1927-1928. Both reforms depicted the previous education efforts as unsuccessful, describing the Brazilian education scene as chaotic. In the case of Rio de Janeiro, the Fernando de Azevedo reform becomes a landmark in the constitution of an education system, establishing a discourse that painted a new future for the public education, while breaking away from previous initiatives. That did not seem to be the case of the Minas Gerais reform. With a discourse shaped at times around the idea of a modern school, and at other times around the idea of an active school, the reformers also proposed to go beyond the past and build a grand future. However, they did not propose to break away from tradition and the educational past. The aim was here that of affirming innovation within tradition, leading to a much more complacent view of the old school than that of Fernando Azevedo. By rewriting the past, the discourses disseminated by the Francisco Campos and Fernando Azevedo reforms have produced the present and reverberated into the future, inaugurating an interpretation of the Brazilian education that would persist for decades in the Brazilian education historiography.