Vilas, “logares” e cidades: a história da educação rural do Pará na Primeira República - 1889 a 1897

Abstract

This is a study of the history of rural education in Pará in the period from 1889 to1897. The last intention is to learn from the historical research, how was the rural education in Pará in the First Republic, focused in the interim governments of Justo Chermont and Huert Bacelar and the constitutional government of Lauro Sodré. Our general goal is to understand how education for men and women in the countryside of the state of Pará was thought and operationalized in the governmental plan. Specifically, we established four goals: a) Conduct a survey of the investments made in rural schools during the reffered period; b) Describe how the rural schools were conceived in the state of Pará in the First Republic; c) Understand, through official documents, which procedures were used to form the citizen of rural schools; d) Understand the government intentions towards the rural population. Two questions have guided the investigation: 1) What intentions permeated the education intended for rural populations of the state of Pará in the governments in the period from 1889 to 1897? 2) What was accomplished in the government plan, for achieving these intentions? The Documentary sources were collected at the Public Archives of the State of Pará and at Arthur Vianna Library, Cultural Center of Pará Tancredo Neves (CENTUR). The research corpus is composed of: reports of governors, messages, letters, petitions, circulars, requirements, reports of directors of public instruction, reports of visitors, school group reports, notebooks of Law of the period. Methodologically, the analysis operates in three phases: 1) the time of heuristics 2) the critical moment, 3) time of interpretation. The text consists of introduction, three sections and final considerations. The work indicates that state governments in the First Republic did very little for the formation of countryside man of the state, despite the sharp political use of education as priority for them. We found that investments in public education had their limit established by the ideology of the republican regime that used to judge rural people as inferior people, who needed to be "polished" to work. By extension, the countryside area was understood as a place of delay and incivility and therefore, a little of formation to its population was considered as enough to turn rude men into citizens, though in lower category.