Sistema métrico decimal: difusão no sistema escolar do Pará (1868 – 1918)

Abstract

The Decimal Metric System was introduced in curriculum of Pará schools in the second half of the 19th Century, in compliance with the Imperial Law of 1862, which made it compulsory education in Brazil. From the 1870s, in Pará, this knowledge became part of the curriculum of vocational schools. Government speeches delivered by the press and choose recorded in Province reports, school regulations, school curricula, textbooks also made it possible to circulate the Decimal Metric System where there were already other practices and ways of measuring. In this research we aim to analyse how the Institutionalization of the Decimal Metric System occurred in the Pará school system in the period from 1868 to 1919. For this we analysed some discourses favourable to the implementation of the Decimal Metric System as the Laws, Educational Regulations, the saying of deputies. The Legislative Assembly, the Presidents of the Province, the Director of Public Instruction, the governors, the authors of books on this subject, as well as the local newspaper related to the culture and society of the time and the relationship with the systems previously used. In the analyses, some aspects of cultural studies were considered, which corroborated the understanding of how this diffusion process occurred, the social position of the subjects who spoke the diffuser discourses, the conditions that allowed the circulation of these discourses and in which cultural context. Modernity in Amazon region in the second half of the 19th Century had Pará as its main gateway, and was funded by the latex economy fuelled by discourses of desire for progress coupled with scientism, school education and vocational training. The diffusion of the Decimal Metric System occurred through discourses that did not only refer to the educational process, but the introduction of a worldview associated with the modernity that was introduced in the region, in the period of the Amazonian Belle Époque and the coexistence of other ways of measuring.